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From: (Nate Baxley)

zxcvbob wrote in message
...
Nate Baxley wrote:

I bought an old farmhouse last year and I'm finally getting around to
fixing up some of the out buildings. The two that I'm working on now
each have power that comes from the main breaker panel in the house.
Each building has it's own fuse box with wiring extending from that.
Now on to the problem.

In the main breaker panel there are two seperate 30 Amp breakers that
each have a very large wire coming out of them. They aren't connected
like a double pole and aren't next to each other like a double pole
breaker. The two wires run into a single cable along with another
large wire wired to the neutral bus. The label on the cable is
"E32071 (UL) 3 CDRS AWG 6 TYPE SE CABLE STYLE U TYPE XHHW CDRS 600V".
Now, the cable goes out of the house and through the air to the first
building (Building A). Outside Building A there are severla wired
wired and taped together. One of the hot wires runs into bulding A
and the other wire splits into building A and also heads off to the
other building (Building B). Inside building A there is a fuse box
and the hot and neutral wires run to the normal connections. The
other hot wire and the split from the netural run through the air to
building B where the neutral and other hot wire run into a fuse box
and throughout the building.

Now for the question. I would like to replace the wires in the air
from A to B and replace the fuse boxes with a circuit panel. What I'm
considering is running both hots and the neutral into a 6 circuit
panel inside Building A and then running 1 circuit in A and 3 circuits
over to B through some underground conduit. The other issue that I
see is that currently at the splice outside building A the heavy wire
is spliced to some smaller old wire, it looks like around 10 gauge,
that runs from the outside into the building. I'm guessing that if I
splice the heavy wire coming from the house to a line into Building A
I need to keep it the same guage, right?

Sorry for the long explanation, but I wanted to try and explain the
situation better. If a picture would help, I can sketch one quick and
post it to my website. Any thoughts that you have would be great.

Thanks,
Nate Baxley

I've been reading all this, and I almost understand it. I would put a
4-space breaker box in "A" and use a 30A 2-pole breaker to supply the
feeder to building B. I would be tempted to reuse one of your fuseboxes
for the service panel in "A" and use two 30A fuses to feed "B". Put a
shiny new 6-space breaker panel in "B" for its 3 circuits and a little
room for expansion. Both "A" and "B" need ground electrodes. Back at
the house, replace the two 30A 1-pole breakers with a 40A or 50A 2-pole
breaker. Be careful when you move breakers around to keep everything on
its original leg or "phase".

I would probably reuse the existing aerial wire from the house to "A",
and bury 4 new wires from "A" to "B". It would be better to run
4-conductor cable from the house to "A", but 3-conductor is allowed and
I'm a cheapskate. (Did I mention I would try to reuse one of the fuse
boxes?)

Have you though about putting a pole at the corner of "A" and using it
as a distribution point to "A" and "B"?

Farm wiring is a lot of fun. Just keep in mind that cattle are *very*
sensitive to voltage gradients and leakage currents. Pay a lot of
attention to grounding.

Bob

Bob,
Thanks for the reply. So if I hear you correctly, I need to put a
circuit panel in A, and use a double pole breaker there to send
another feeder into another circuit panel in B. I can just use a
grounding wire into the ground for each panel, but I still need to run
a 4 wire feeder cable from A to B. That sound correct? As for moving
the breakers around and upping them to 40 Amps on the main breaker in
the house, is that really neccesary? Not to question, but what makes
it necesary to move them together and up the ampage? The main reason
I ask is that the breaker box is a mess (obviously been added to by
some people in a hurry) and I'm dreading haveing to unplug breakers
and reroute wires around that box. If it's something that needs to be
done, I'll do it but I was just curious as to the reasons.

We currently don't have any cattle, but I'll bone up on my grounding
skills before I get into this too much.

Thanks again,
Nate Baxley

OK Nate - you've got your answers, reasons, reasonings, code quotes, etc. Now
shutup and get off the internet and do the damn work.