Nate Baxley wrote:

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?

There are quite a few correct ways to do it; some better than others.

"A" and "B" should each have only one feeder circuit coming in. It
doesn't matter whether B's panel is fed from A or from the house.
Feeding B off of A's panel sounds simplest to me, although someone else
mentioned a tap in an underground juncion box that sounded
interesting... but I'd hate to have to dig it up again later and try to
find the box if it needed service.

Every building should have a ground.

If you run 4 wires from the house to A, you have to run 4 wires from A
to B. If you run 3 wires from the house to A I think you *could* run
just 3 wires from A to B, but I wouldn't recommend it.


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.

I depends on how right you want to do it. The mess you have now will
work, but it doesn't provide a common trip (if one side overloads and
trip it opens the other breaker too, and if you manually turn off one
breaker the other is also turned off.) And there's no need to up the
breaker size, but you can if you want -- the existing wires can handle
it. I mentioned a 40A breaker because I thought you would be buying a
new 2-pole breaker anyway to get the feeder circuit into one switch with
a common trip.

If you reuse the existing wires, (overhead wires, right? I don't
remember) you can start at the outbuildings and get them working first.
You can redo the house breaker box later when you get around to it --
which can be postponed indefinitely.

If the breaker box in the house was made by Federal Pacific or Zinsco, I
wouldn't open it up either until I was ready to replace it completely
(which would be pretty high on my todo list)

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


Best regards,
Bob -- not an electrician

P.S. I just had another idea. You can run 3 insulated wires in a metal
conduit from the panel in A to the point where the wires connect from
the house. If you ever decide you want 4 wires from the house instead
of 3, you can replace the old triplex cable with quadraplex; connect the
bare messenger wire to the metal conduit with an appropriate clamp or
grounding bushing, and you won't have to pull another wire into the
panel. (you will have to seperate the ground from the neutral inside
the panel.)