-> Has anyone any observations derived from hindsight?
I'm pretty happy with mine. The outlet wiring is at 40", pulled
through the studs, and the outlets are at 48" so they don't get in the
way of the bundle.
My electrical service entrance is at a front corner, so the wiring
harness runs around three sides. I have two separately breakered runs
of 110v. The beige outlets are on one run, the black on another. The
outlets alternate, four feet apart - beige-black-beige... etc. That
way, I don't lose all power if I pop a breaker, and if I have one string
loaded, I can plug into the other.
The six 220v outlets have their own breakers. This comes out as a lot
of wire - the harness is the size of my forearm by the time it gets to
the box. We're talking maybe $30 of wire here, and I went up two sizes
from code because overkill is a fine thing.
I also pulled several runs of cat-5 twisted pair and thinnet coax, so I
can add an intercom, phones, cable radio, and link up to the LAN in the
house if I get the urge. I got the twisted pair for free, but it's not
expensive.
The only thing I regret is spacing the outlets four feet apart. If I
do it again, I'll do it two or three feet. Wherever there's an outlet,
there seems to be a waiting cord. Quad boxes might have helped, but
they're special order items around here. Construction stuff is very
strange and very regional.
Local code limits you to six or eight outlets per breaker; number of
breakers determines the size of your service entrance, if the shop is
wired independent of the house. My old house was slapdash-wired before
the city had adopted any sort of code and has a 40-amp service entrance
and a bunch of jerry-rigging; to add the shop to the house would have
basically required rewiring the entire house, since the inspector
insisted all the old cloth-covered wiring would have to be replaced too.
The simplest solution was to put an appropriate sized service entrance
on the shop, run a buried line to the old service entrance on the house,
and have the power company swing the feed wire from the house to the
shop.
-> awkward. Right now I'm looking at a ceiling-level main conduit run,
-> with tees dropping to boxes at normal level on the wall.
Wire is cheap! I took the direct route with all of mine, but it would
cost you little more to indulge yourself.
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