sciens
New member
- Location
- Wolf Creek, OR
Hello All! First off, I would like to thank everyone in the community and staff for making this forum possible. It has been an amazing resource to answer questions I have had in residential wiring, and - being from the data center industry - am excited to contribute my own knowledge of critical infrastructure when available.
Now, to the nitty-gritty:
I am planning a business around IT outsourcing and found a need to build a home data center to host services for customers and my own operations applications. That being said, I am not up on residential deployments, but have found many issues on my older house wiring that led me to the solution of installing a new service entrance. The existing entrance is neither sufficient, permitted nor up to my understanding of residential code requirements. There is one permit from circa 1982 for a temporary power pole for a trailer hookup or something. Ungrounded 10-2 romex is installed for pretty much every circuit in the house, old fashioned 100A rated fusebox with a 60A pull fuse disconnect, water heater and well pump spliced to the same 30A 240v circuit/fuse. And, to my dismay the kitchen range spliced out to the detatched garage/shop I installed my rack in. The circuit is protected by a 60A 240v pull fuse and the splice that goes to the breaker box in the shop is buried 8-2 grounded romex. *cringe*
After consulting the AHJ (who is seemingly quite happy im wanting to fix these issues) and the PoCo I came to this solution:
And this is what I have installed thus far:
I have also installed 2" EMT using rain tight couplers and I need to but bonding locknuts to meet grounding/bonding requirements. THe 23.5" space between the meter socket and main breaker box is to accomodate for a whole-house transfer switch for a 16KwH propane generator which will be installed after this is completed. The current service entrance is to the right of the first pictured window. Which leads me to two questions:
First off, are there any restrictions on running conduit above a window (clearances etc)? This is my planned solution:
The top LB is to run a subpanel to the back of the house later down the line. The LB to the right is to penetrate the wall to get to the current fusebox, which will also be replaced with a proper breaker box later. When I re run the shop underground feeder I intend to install a 1-1/2" EMT with rain-tight couplers and a LB conduit body below the main breaker to run under the house and to the underground PVC conduit that will be located on the other side of the house.
Second, to try and shave costs I wanted to run EMT from the top of the main breaker box and use EMT conduit bodies. From what I have read, there is no way to properly connect EMT to the top of a NEMA 3R box and keep the rating, and theres a good bit of controversy to mating EMT to the appropriate threaded hub that comes with the breaker box. I am prepared to purchase IMC, but just wanted to get a definitive answer regarding this topic.
A third and final question is an embarrassing subject. I accidentally knocked out the 2-1/2" knockout on the meter socket and wanted to use reducing washers to fix this issue, since my planned transfer switch only has 2" knockouts. Is there a way to make reducing washers acceptable and maintain the NEMA 3/3R ratings of my boxes?
Thank you in advance!
Now, to the nitty-gritty:
I am planning a business around IT outsourcing and found a need to build a home data center to host services for customers and my own operations applications. That being said, I am not up on residential deployments, but have found many issues on my older house wiring that led me to the solution of installing a new service entrance. The existing entrance is neither sufficient, permitted nor up to my understanding of residential code requirements. There is one permit from circa 1982 for a temporary power pole for a trailer hookup or something. Ungrounded 10-2 romex is installed for pretty much every circuit in the house, old fashioned 100A rated fusebox with a 60A pull fuse disconnect, water heater and well pump spliced to the same 30A 240v circuit/fuse. And, to my dismay the kitchen range spliced out to the detatched garage/shop I installed my rack in. The circuit is protected by a 60A 240v pull fuse and the splice that goes to the breaker box in the shop is buried 8-2 grounded romex. *cringe*
After consulting the AHJ (who is seemingly quite happy im wanting to fix these issues) and the PoCo I came to this solution:
And this is what I have installed thus far:
I have also installed 2" EMT using rain tight couplers and I need to but bonding locknuts to meet grounding/bonding requirements. THe 23.5" space between the meter socket and main breaker box is to accomodate for a whole-house transfer switch for a 16KwH propane generator which will be installed after this is completed. The current service entrance is to the right of the first pictured window. Which leads me to two questions:
First off, are there any restrictions on running conduit above a window (clearances etc)? This is my planned solution:
The top LB is to run a subpanel to the back of the house later down the line. The LB to the right is to penetrate the wall to get to the current fusebox, which will also be replaced with a proper breaker box later. When I re run the shop underground feeder I intend to install a 1-1/2" EMT with rain-tight couplers and a LB conduit body below the main breaker to run under the house and to the underground PVC conduit that will be located on the other side of the house.
Second, to try and shave costs I wanted to run EMT from the top of the main breaker box and use EMT conduit bodies. From what I have read, there is no way to properly connect EMT to the top of a NEMA 3R box and keep the rating, and theres a good bit of controversy to mating EMT to the appropriate threaded hub that comes with the breaker box. I am prepared to purchase IMC, but just wanted to get a definitive answer regarding this topic.
A third and final question is an embarrassing subject. I accidentally knocked out the 2-1/2" knockout on the meter socket and wanted to use reducing washers to fix this issue, since my planned transfer switch only has 2" knockouts. Is there a way to make reducing washers acceptable and maintain the NEMA 3/3R ratings of my boxes?
Thank you in advance!
