@kwf Are those metal pipes required by building code in your area? Here in Germany, both cable ducts and water lines would usually be done using some form of PE plastic piping.
For the record, this poor sucker is about to get a master class in electrical design tonight. He's going to learn more than he ever expected while helping me.
The absolutely deranged part of this subpanel project is that the feeder for it passes through a current operated switch, so my home automation will be able to see when this subpanel is pulling more than 15A on L1. https://amzn.to/3TwrH5x
Second night of wiring with my neighbor. We got the two 20A 120V circuits run, so each side of the garage has an external in-use box, and then I hung a quad of receptacles off the load side of one of the GFCIs for more outlets inside.
Last thing left to do is wire up the 14-50 for 50A of 240V.
@kwf Out of curiosity, I see you have NEMA 5-15 receptacles on that 20 A circuit. I know it's fairly rare to come across NEMA 5-20P appliances, so was it an intentional decision to not use NEMA 5-20 receptacles for that circuit?
@litchralee The external receptacles are 5-20 since I can conceive of someone showing up with a 5-20 EVSE, but for convenience outlets inside the garage I'm only expecting to be plugging a 350W air compressor / battery charger in so I only bothered putting in 5-15s there because I already had them on hand
@kwf Ah. So do the outside receptacles provide GFCI protection for the inside receptacles?
That's one thing I could never quite square away with the NEC, since if a plug-and-cord EVSE has its own built-in GFCI, I still don't know if that would obviate the need for the required-but-less-intelligent GFCI on the circuit itself.
@litchralee yeah, the 5-15s are hanging off the LOAD port on the outward facing GFCI.
If the EVSE is hardwired you can rely on its GFCI, but there's nothing preventing you from unplugging an EVSE from an unprotected receptacle and plugging in something which isn't protecting.
I'm just ignoring the GFCI requirement for the 14-50 (mutters something about my Lincoln tombstone welder), and plan to have a single 60A GFCI breaker feeding my entire shop panel when I put that one in
Also, TIL 60A GFCI. I do wish they'd make a 60A AFCI or larger, as it would fulfill my dreams of resurrecting the concept of MWBC 12/3 circuits, so I can have NEMA 5 and NEMA 6 receptacles colocated all around my house. For those sweet 240 VAC space heaters, kettles, servers, and European espresso machines lol
@litchralee Yep, I figured the pain of a single $140 breaker would outweigh being able to not worry about GFCI on every single outlet inside the shop itself downstream of the 20 slot panel being fed by the breaker. https://amzn.to/48XkcsF
@jrward it's very standard practice for bigger wire sizes that are only made in black. I just happened to have 6AWG in red vs 8awg for black and white.
@jpsays I have an Enphase whole house backup system that supports dropping contactors when the grid goes down and the house goes to local microgrid, so it will shed the EV panel to prevent it from draining the whole house battery in 2 hours before I notice we lost power.
@kwf I'm intrigued by this device. Is this purely to trigger a warning or do you have some logic attached to the signal? I'm tempted to use something like this in an off grid application to pause EV charging when another short duration high draw load (well pump, microwave) pops up, so as to not overload an inverter.
@iansmcleod For now just a warning. If I do ever manage to nuisance trip my 100A service, then I can set this up to drop the contactor on my water heater to reduce peak load
@iansmcleod This box will also eventually have a contactor in it for the whole EV subpanel, so I'll probably have the dryer drop this contactor or something.
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