Calling all electricians for advice on wiring home

I put in three 10 ga Romex dedicated lines myself. It's not difficult, surely not rocket science, but if you are not mechanically inclined, wiser to let an electrician do it (safety). Be sure that the electricity is off.

The hardest part (for this old man), was crawling 40 feet in a very tight crawl space, and digging two trenches in lava rock, for the two 8' dedicated ground rods. The only real pain with using 10 ga wire is when terminating the ends (stiff wire), and getting them to cooperate sharing space in the small electrical baxes - Ha!

I terminated each dedicated line with Porter Ports - very worthwhile.

As for the sub-panel, I used a 12 circuit breaker box, and connected my three lines into breakers 1, 5, and 9 - i.e.:

1 - 2
3 - 4
5 - 6
7 - 8
9 - 10
11 - 12

Same side, but every other row, so that they are same phase.

Damn Shventus!

What you went through to install your circuits sounds similar to Navy SEAL training.

To liven things up next time you decide to crawl under your house, make sure to set up some barbed wire barriers and have your wife hide a few claymore mines in random spots.

Better yet, hire Slappy!

Thanks Gunbei,

I sure felt like I was going through some military basic training (Marines, Navy Seals, BUDS, etc.), but I think that it was real enough, I'll pass on the barbed wire, live firing, explosions, and hidden claymores. It was so tight, dark, and humid under my house, here in the tropics, when my knees landed on sharp lava rocks, I thought that I HAD unearthed a claymore. My back didn't forgive me for days - Ha!

Your story reminds me of when I went under my house a few years ago to run the PVC pipe for my long runs of interconnect.

I had been in total darkness for about half an hour, except for the small flashlight that was resting between my face and the earth. I could only see a few feet beyond that small pool of light.

I sensed something moving off to my left and turned my head. In the dark I could see two glowing eyes moving slowly toward me. I banged my head on the 2X4 runners reaching my hand around to grip the flashlight and when I aimed the beam toward the light I saw my tortoise shell colored kitty cat smiling at me.

I still can't believe she jumped into the scuttle hole to find me. I was never so glad to see a cat in my life.

Albert: I cracked up when i read your story. I bet you got "a little excited" when you saw "glow in the dark" eyes coming at you, especially eyes that big. With our minds working the way that they do and you being in such a dark and dirty space, i bet that your imagination was primed and ready to go. My guess is that the first thing that came to mind when you saw those eyes was trying to imagine the size of the "mouse" that went along with eyes that big. I think we all know why you hit your head in such a situation : ) Sean
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PS... If one is going to run lines under the house in a dirt crawlspace, why not connect your ground line directly to a ground rod in the crawlspace directly under the floor where the outlets are? This would provide both a phenomenally short path to ground and year round weather protection for the connections to ground. To be safe though and meet local code, you should tie the audio system ground rod back into the grounding system used for the AC mains. While tieing the two ground rods together, clean and weatherproof the connections of the original ground rod used for the mains. All of this is based on the idea that one would be able to drive a ground rod into the soil in their crawlspace, which might not be all that feasible in some situations.