I’m still playing catch-up on projects, so this story takes place in September. With the garage construction mostly wrapped up, the electrical was on us to complete ourselves, since the fairly reasonable quote we originally got ballooned when we asked for electrical vehicle charging to the point we just said no thanks.
The first step was to dig a trench from the house to the garage. Normally, this would use a trenching tool that you can rent from Home Depot, but our back porch is only two feet from the property line that has a fence running along it, which means that close to half of the trench would need to be dug manually. The cost and effort of the trencher to do less than half of the digging didn’t seem worth it, so instead we dug the whole thing by hand.
Sarah and I, with help from the kids, managed this over a couple of weeks. We needed to account for a few extra steps, including an underground downspout, a separate conduit for networking, and a tight corner between the porch footing and the row of junipers we’d planted last year. Since the downspout pipe needed to cross the electrical as well as slope down, we dug out something like a highway exit ramp and overpass.
The electrical conduit could be made of Schedule 40 PVC, but above ground could not, so I transitioned to metal conduit. This meant picking up a pipe threader that could handle 1-1/4″ pipe but I found a cheap one from Vevor that worked well. It still required Sarah to stand on the wooden beam I screwed the pipe clamp to while I used a breaker bar on the ratchet mechanism. We managed to collapse a short pipe section doing this and had to start again.
It took a couple tried to snake the heavy gauge wire through the conduit clear from one end to the other, especially given the jog in the conduit, but after a couple of tries and staggering the wire ends before taping them together we successfully pulled the bundle through and got the whole mess from the panel in the basement to the subpanel in the garage.
Dean arrived to help with the next stage. With his help we got the ends on both sides terminated and the breakers installed as well as put the grounding rods in. We also bent some conduit in the garage to run a couple of outlets including one for the garage door opener as well as the 50-amp EV charger outlet and a circuit for lights. I hooked up the new garage door opener as well as an exterior light on the back yard side. Amazingly, everything worked on the first try and the circuit tester confirmed good ground and neutral.
Eventually, we plan several more outlets and better lighting, but this let us charge our truck at home on something better than an extension cord for the first time, which was dramatically faster. That, along with being able to open and close the overhead door with a button instead of getting out to open and close the gate on the yard as we come and go has made the garage a big quality of life improvement.
The low voltage conduit allowed me to run Internet out to the garage and install a Wifi extender, helpful when working in the garage as well as to keep the smart garage door opener and electric truck happy. It also allowed me to hook up the DVR for our security cameras, but I’ll cover that system in another post.