You have come a long way on this project and as you begin to take advantage of your building you are gonna enjoy it.
I just wish I had something half that size so I could tinker with my cars and other projects. This is fantastic!!

 

Thanks! It'll be vastly more useful once it has power. It is super nice to work in - Ive done a few oil changes in it now. Just a bit of a pain dragging out all of the battery lights to work.



Made a good bit more progress this weekend. That rotary hammer with a clay spade made easy work of digging under the block wall gate footing. I should've bought that tool long ago. Id already chopped at it for almost 3 hours with a pick and shovel to barely get flush to the concrete edge. This rotary hammer cleared the whole rest of the tunnel out in 15-20 minutes max with near zero effort on my part.



Got the entire rest of the channel dug out but uncovered one sticky spot up by the house's electrical panel:



So the red tube on the left is the main feed coming into the house.

The gray pvc on the right is the wire the previous owners ran to the pool fountain and the grill area. They did disclose this on the binsr - that it was buried very shallow. It's way under spec for depth - maybe 3-4" under the surface. Ive run into it in several spots doing other work. They probably wont say anything about this since it's pre-existing work / not being touched here and is functionally intact.

The metal conduit in the middle is the real issue (unfortunately that's exactly what it looked like - I didnt do anything other than manually scoop the dirt from around it). That feeds an outlet on the back porch and the in ground pool light on 2 separate circuits with 7 wires crammed into it (a mix of all sorts of colors, including 2 identical yellows).

If it werent for the pool light, Id chop it off and plug the hole, but I really dont want to lose my only light. I know they usually dont say anything about pre existing work, but I dont think theyll let this go as is - not with live wires and a few damaged conductors.

I dont think there's any way to save it either. The conduit is only maybe 6" under ground, so it often gets soaked. The metal is absolutely disintegrating - no way to get a compression fitting on it. Replacing it would be a pain as the last 30 feet are buried under concrete now.

Going to have to do some thinking on this one...

 

As you noted, that middle, metal conduit has a few problems. You may want to check on electrical code, but that looks over stuffed.I am curious how you might resolve this. Such as, any idea of all the conduit is that bad? Can some of the wire be used to pull new wire (maybe direct burial cable instead).
Curious to see your solution.

 

Absolutely! Max allowable fill is 40% and just looking visually, this is well over half. I dont know why theyve got so many wires in it to start - 7 in total, but at least the way it's wired now they only used 4 (hot to 1x 15 amp breaker, hot to another 15 amp breaker on the opposite side - same side of the 120 wave, then apparently they share one neutral and one ground - all the rest are capped).

So far it's all very bad. Ive got about 4 feet uncovered so far (as it runs down my new trench before turning off into the dirt). The first foot is by far the worst. It's not even clear what actually broke / where that missing chunk went - but that whole first foot you can easily pop off chunks of rust with your fingers so it probably all disintegrated away.

At the furthest point, it's a bit better. The thing is 100% rust encapsulated, but it does at least sound like a metallic pipe if you ding it with the hand shovel (the top sounds like hitting tree bark). But whatever is intact has to be thin as it easily bent by hand with little pressure.

Id thought about digging up more along the length of it, but Im worried about making this into a bigger mess with the inspector - I really dont want to turn this into a separate permit job.

Im very tempted to hack it off flush with the dirt, pull its breakers (and put in a blockoff on the one side) and just pretend it doesnt exist / deal with it on my own later.

That is a good idea. If I end up totally abandoning the current setup, it'll be worth a try. I worry with how jam packed it is (and being 2x 90 degree turns away with 100 feet to the end) that it may get jammed up in the corners. There's no room to move, especially if those wires twist inside at all. I really doubt they actually pulled these wires through the finished conduit.

Perhaps pulling 1 strand at a time would be easier. I could even back the trailer winch up to it - either it moves or it breaks the wire trying.

 

If any of that wire is abandoned, might be worth seeing if you can pull/remove it to help with pulling. Also, I know there is a wire pulling lube that is sold. May need some of that to help. This makes me happy that I did NOT entertain metallic conduit for burial. I know PVC has it's limits too, but I think that was ultimately the smarter play.Good news is, you keep making progress!

 

After thinking it over for a few days, I think Im just going to cut it off flush with the dirt trench wall and remove the associated wires / breakers. That'll get me through this project and I can mess with it later when Ive got time / wont have AHJ calling the shots.

When I get time, I think Ill try what you mentioned - pulling the wires through. Im super doubtful it'll pull with how jam packed full it is, but I can always back the trailer up to it and try to winch a wire out. If it breaks it breaks, but it's worth a shot. If I can get the wires out, then Ive got some options.

If that'a a catastrophic failure and the wires are jammed tight, plan B is to run new conduit to this box on the patio from an existing circuit on the house / up along the porch ceiling. Wife wants to do tongue and groove ceiling anyways to cover the ugly exposed porch roofing structure, so adding an ugly chunk of conduit won't be so bad since I can conceal it.

That's a good idea, Ill give that a try. As far as I can tell, 3 of the 7 wires were never used (at least theyre capped in the breaker box). No clue why theyd run so many wires for 2 outlets and a light.

Yep, Ive got a ton. I use a bunch running the power cables. Bad thing is if these wires wont move an inch, it may be useless. That stuff is super thick, so there's no way to force much down a chock full conduit - at least not the dozens of feet to get to where the 90 degree bends will be.

I hear you on that! Not to mention it's way more expensive and much harder to work with.

No doubt they made a big mistake here burying it so shallow - every time we get flood irrigation, this stuff is getting soaked. But Ive never seen conduit in this bad of shape. Really makes me wonder if they just ran interior thin wall EMT instead of actual galvanized RMC. The average homeowner would never know the difference - they'd just see metal pipe and think they got what they paid for.

 

Well, I officially have conduit / feed wires run from panel to panel.

Neat shot of some conduit in the trench - the teeth marks in the wall look cool.



And the 'path of least resistance' solution to the mess.

Cut and capped those 3/4 water lines. No clue where they come from / go to, but I figured Id just cap them in case I figured it out / decided to use them for something later. Oddly enough both were full of (non pressurized) water so they were clearly used at some point.

For that rusty pool light metal conduit, I just chopped it flush with the dirt and deleted the wiring in the box for now. Ill try winching some of the wire out later once this permit is closed to see if its even possible to pull fresh wire through it. After seeing the cross section cut through, Im very doubtful - it's easily 90%+ packed.

It's a bit ugly as I had to use 2x 45s instead of a 90 to avoid the concrete kickout of the foundation. Also have no idea what happened with the glue - went a little overboard on some of the joints, lol.



Went ahead and scheduled the inspections for Friday: grounding electrode, underground electrical, and rough in electrical.

Still have a few loose ends to clean up to be ready, but its 99% there. Fingers crossed...

Im hoping they ignore that other small pvc conduit / being a code violation for being so shallow. There's at least half a dozen other code violations inside the box too - so hopefully they ignore things Im not touching with this project.