I Said it was Only Temporary, But...

Now that the porch was gone, the next thing in line was to get our existing overhead electric service moved out of the way. It comes to the house on the same side where the addition is going to go. There are three insulated individual solid copper lines coming from the nearest utility pole up to the peak of the house. 

A very old and rough looking service entrance cable then goes down the peak, disappears under the eave and runs to the front of the house, right next to the entrance on this side of the house. Not a very nice place to have a meter. 

So, we hired an electrician to temporarily move the service out of the way. He in turn coordinated with the local utility power company to do their part. Within a couple of hours, the service was moved. Not exactly how I pictured, but the job was done. I assumed they'd put up a utility pole right next to the front of the house and run the line to there and down. What the electrician ended up doing was place a couple of ordinary 12' 4x4's into the ground about two feet and stringing it up from there. Well, I guess it is just temporary...


The utility company ended up replacing the wiring coming from the transformer all the way to the house. This was old pure bare copper coming from the transformer to the next pole. 


From there it turned into the insulated wire I that goes to the house. All of this was changed to the modern and standard triplex wire, all wrapped into one insulated bundle. They left this cable extra-long so that it can be moved to it's final location once the new addition is complete. 

The plan is to eventually move the service to that same end of the house, the exterior wall of the addition. At that time the electric meter will also be moved to that side of the house, out of view. The service entrance cable will quickly disappear under the crawl space and run to to a brand new main panel to be installed in place of the old Wadsworth panel we have now. It's old and we're just about out of space in there now. 



It may not look pretty but we have power to the house. We just have to keep reminding ourselves that it's all just temporary. 










Now that everything is out of the way, ground breaking is next!