"DerbyDad03" wrote in message
...
On Saturday, January 23, 2016 at 10:54:23 AM UTC-5, TomR wrote:
wrote in message
...
On Fri, 22 Jan 2016 23:35:44 -0500, "TomR"
wrote:

That's what the "drip loop" is there for. Around here if the
inspector doesn't find that "drip loop" he is very likely to give you
a deficiency report.

On the property where I had the water-inside-panel problem, there is a
drip
loop up at the top of what I think maybe is called the mast head (or
something like that), where the power line from the pole meets the
service
drop that goes down into the top of the meter box.

Where it comes out of the bottom of the meter box, there is no drip
loop.
It just runs down into the building and into the top of the electric
panel.
I don't know that I have ever seen a drip loop on that part of the
service
line coming into a building (below the meter), but I never really
looked
carefully to see if there is a drip loop there. Since the water was
coming
from inside the meter box (getting in through the top of the meter
box),
and
was running INSIDE the wire going from there to the panel, I don't know
if
a
drip loop in that line would have prevented the problem of water
getting
into the panel inside the house.

If the wire from the meter droops below the conduit exiting the meter
box to the inside of the building, water cannot follow the wire into
the building and into the panel.

I may be wrong about this, but I think the purpose of a drip loop is to
have
water that is on the outside of the wire drip off at the low point of the
loop rather than running down on the outside of the wire into a structure
etc.

But, I think that any water that is INSIDE a conduit will continue to
flow
inside that conduit down into the drip loop then back up and then down
again
to the lowest point in the conduit down below. If it were water inside a
hose, as new water flowed into the hose at the top of the hose the water
inside the hose would continue flowing down to the lowest point further
down
at the end of the hose. This would be similar to a sink drain and
trap --
where the trap is in effect a "drip loop". Similarly, water on the
outside
of the sink drain would drip off at the bottom of the trap. But water
inside the drain line would continue to flow down to the end of the drain
line and would continue past the "drip loop"/trap.

In the scenario that I had where water was getting inside the conduit and
going into the panel, if the conduit had a drip loop in it, I could have
cut
a small slit in the conduit wrap at the bottom of the drip loop to let
the
water inside the conduit drip out there rather than continue down into
the
panel inside the house in the basement. Of course, that would only have
been a temporary fix until I corrected the problem of water getting
inside
the conduct from the meter box. In my case, there was no such drip loop
in
that part of the conduit (from the bottom of the meter to the panel below
inside the house in the basement).

What you describe in your last paragraph is exactly what I did when I had
water coming into my panel. There wasn't exactly a "drip loop" but there
was a dip in the service cable along its run. When I put a small slit in
the outer jacket, water dripped out for a few minutes. I never got water
in
the panel again. I eventually fixed the root cause of the water getting
into the cable and put some silicon adhesive on the slit to seal it up.

I understand. I wanted to do exactly what you did -- first put a slit in a
low point, then later solve the primary problem by keeping the water out of
the cable in the first place. But, in my situation there was no horizontal
run where I could even bend it a little to create a dip in the service cable
where I could cut a slit in the outer jacket.