On 24 Apr 2006 06:34:05 -0700, wrote:

RBM wrote:
One common situation I've had is replacing broken or rotten
residential lamp posts. [...snip...]

Thanks to all for the replies. The splices in question were in fact to
feed a light post, but not because the post is rotting.

Epilogue:
Since the two cuts were in the middle of a 70 foot underground run, I
decided to hand dig just for the splices down to 18" (about ten feet of
trench), trim the existing UF line back to cable unaffected by the
backhoe and splice in new UF wire using four of the ($11) Ideal UF
splice kits from Home Depot.

Materials cost was about $55 all-in. If the line were crucial, I
probably would have dug the 70' trench and replaced the line
end-to-end. As it is, the line is a seldom-used feed for the lightpole
and nothing else - failure wouldn't be a disaster - so I skipped the
70' hand dig.

In retrospect, I spent much more time cutting, stripping and splicing
the UF cable than I would have hand-digging the trench. I had never
worked with UF before, and managed to give myself a pretty nice gash
with a utility knife before I got the knack of stripping the solid
outer jacket. Lesson: hand-digging a trench to bury cable just doesn't
take that long. If I had done the hand-dig, I would have saved both
time and money and would have a better result in the ground right now.

I may have a chance to check this out later. As I said, I didn't
splice the cable because the lamp post is rotting, I spliced it because
a backhoe hit the cable in two places. Having said that, the lamp post
is, in fact, rotting.

Again, thanks to all for your attention and for sharing your knowledge.


Thx for the follow-up.

Have to admit, that sometimes getting overzealous with a knife to cut
uf's jacket has resulted in me damaging the individual conductor
insulations, so I understand why it took a while.

later,

tom @ www.CarFleaMarket.com