In article ,
default wrote:
I suspect that you are misunderstanding the reason why the shutoff
has to be close to the meter. Given that in order to get to my panel,
you have to go into the house and down and under the cellar stairs,
it's not going to be so you can get to it quickly. I suspect, rather,
that it's because you don't want to have a 30-70' of number 2
cable running through the length of your house with no shutoff but
the transformer even after you've "shut off" the power in your house.

It'd kind of suck to shut off the mains, and then hit the feeder cable
with your sawsall while cutting down an interior wall....

Actually, I don't think it would "suck". I think it would more
"blow", and the person operating the sawsall would blow first :-)

This makes for an even better reason to have a main breaker on the
outside of the house (not just a shutoff, but a real breaker, which
will automatically open under overload). What if someone is
harmlessly nailing somewhere (maybe nailing something to the floor
right above the big feeder cable), or nailing to the other side of the
joist that the feeder is attached to), and hits the feeder? If you
get lucky, the nail burns a hole into the conductor, and maybe it
electrocutes the person. If you get unlucky, you burn down the house.

When we built our house (which has about 50' of a 200A feeder going
from the main panel outside the house to the subpanel in the center of
the basement), I decided that the feeder was going to go into conduit.
Partially that was for safety reasons (even EMT, which is pretty
thin-wall, gives you reasonable protection and a good visual warning
in the 1.5" size required for a 200A feeder). Partially that was
because buying the required feeder cable in NM-style (we needed
#2/0-3) was impractical to obtain: home centers don't stock it, and
the electrical distributors only sell a whole reel, which is
HORRENDOUSLY expensive. Even as it was, installing the feeder was not
cheap (two-ought cable is expensive, 1.5" conduit and the fittings for
it is expensive, and I had to bring the conduit to a pipe bending
company to have two custom bends made in it, because I couldn't find
any place that would lend or rent me a pipe bender that size).

Don't even ask how much fun it was to pull the four wires (including
ground) through the conduit. Even with a whole bottle of pulling
lubricant in the conduit and cleaning sand/dirt off the wire
meticulously before going into the conduit, we ended up having to use
a 2x4 attached to the end of the wire as a lever to aid in pulling.
It was a miserable afternoon. Should have used larger conduit.

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Ralph Becker-Szendy