June 20, 2025

    The electricians were up today to start some really tough jobs. 

    Our electric meter is a smart reader, So Poudre Valley REA doesn’t have to send somebody all over the country to read the meters! One really neat feature of it, is that it reads maximum instantaneous power draw and Poudre Valley puts the monthly maximum seen on our power bill. Why is this important? We’ve never seen a draw larger than 15 kw and the emergency generator can supply up to 24 kw. Yeah! We can put the whole house on the generator. That’s one of the electricians tough jobs - putting in another fail-over switch for the 2nd panel and connecting the generator to it.

    This required cables rated to about 150 amps, and today that means aluminum, since copper is so expensive. The fail-over switches are designed for aluminum. 

    The second tough job is the elevator low voltage control cable rough-in. This required running 3 smurf tubes from the south guest bedroom closet to the top of the elevator shaft. Wait, wait, you say! What the heck is smurf tube? Its a nonmetallic tube used for low voltage cables. When they were first invented they were the same color of blue as the smurfs. 

    This was difficult because this place has a lot of steel which has to be dodged around. It also has a lot of micro lams, which are incredibly tough to drill through.

    The third, easy job, is cleaning up the ethernet in the grotto that runs from the TV stand to the lower mechanical room X-410 controller.

    Today was just the cutting of drywall and all the drilling. Monday, June 23 they’ll come back to do the actual pulling of the cables and tubes.    

Here’s exactly what it is. “3C 4/0 1C 2/0” means 3 conductors of size 0000 (about 1/2”) and 1 conductor of size 00 (about 1/3”). 

Drilling from the bottom to the top of the Great Room Soffit. The top of the elevator shaft is above the soffit.