Sewage Treatment Plant wiring methods

[AHE Tom]

I was asked to review a project, an existing small private sewage treatment plant that is to be supplied with a dedicated electrical service, rather than be sub fed from an existing facility.

Existing facilities:
Small, private sewage treatment plant serving two buildings on a common site.
Pole building is served via a residential 200 amp load center located in a small room within the main pole building.
2 underground wet wells, with exterior control panel being fed with PVC, and GRS serving the pumps, and floats below in the tank, and (no sealoffs) in GRS pipe.
Sewage treat tanks (open to atmosphere) in pole barn with PVC conduit serving the sensors, floats, motors, etc.
The pole barn interior wiring is all romex wiring, metal and plastic boxes, with standard interior devices.

It is no problem to provide a dedicated service for this building
BUT
With the information that I have outlined above, I feel the existing circuiting does not meet code (no classified circuiting), and that if a new service was to be installed, the installing party would be liable for connecting the existing non code compliant to the new service.

Am I correct about the existing branch circuiting needing to be in a classified raceway system ?


Thanks
Tom

 

[Buck Parrish]

No you are not correct, you don't have to re do the old one. It should have been in conduit yes.

But yours is a dedicated electrical service. It has nothing to do with the other one. When they see how you do the new one. May be they will ask you to re wire the other one, too. At their cost.

The AHJ's or the Health dept. might have a say in it.


If your working around sewage. Be sure and up date your tetnus shot. And perhaps a hepatitus shot to.

 

[petersonra]

I don't see anything especially bad about what you describe. The inside of a pole barn is inside, so interior wiring methods are OK, presuming Romex is allowed for that type of construction.

As for classified wiring, if you are referring to it being a classified area, only a few parts are classified. And its entirely possible at least some parts of the wiring can be run in PVC. Somewhere that should be a document of some sort that defines the classification of the area(s).