Week 129 (Panel Installs, Part 2)

In construction photos, Uncategorized by manifold_admin

The 800A Main Distribution Panel that was sitting on its pallet last week was installed this week:

The 8″ CMU blocks tell you it’s nearly 80″ tall!  Let’s have a look inside…

With the switch in the OFF position, we can open the door to see inside:

The wires inside are MCM500, which are very nearly 1″ in diameter.  They don’t look so big in the picture, but that’s because the panel is enormous, and throws off the scale.  Here’s a more detailed view showing the working parts of the 800A switch:

Here’s a close-up of the MCM500 wire, showing the 37 strands of AWG 10 solid copper wire:

While the photo shows only one such, each of the legs (ground, supply, and neutral) have two such wires entering and leaving the panel, as shown in this detail:

From the MDP, these legs are split, with half the power going to the Main building and half going to the Annex.  Here are the three wires making up the ground-supply-neutral trio in the Main building:

And the same for the Annex:

The smaller wires on the left feed a branch in the Annex proper:

In the above photo the wires look quite proportionately sized to the panel.  But the panel’s about 1/4 as large as the MDP, and the wires, too, are about 1/4 the cross-sectional area, as the main Annex panel makes clear.

Beyond the realm of the electrical, progress was made on many other fronts as well.  The roof insulation work was completed:

Later this was covered with sheetrock:

The duct work in Booth A got both supplies:

And the return:

We are also now doing the real push on our final hardscaping.  Several new pallets of blocks have been delivered:

And we’ve begun to put our patio drains and drainage into place:

Here’s a view of the opposite side of the North Patio, with the foundation for our built-in planter in the foreground:

That’s probably enough of an update for this week.  Every week is a week of vital progress, and as much as I’ve enjoyed reporting the progress of this past week, I’m really looking forward to see what progress we make next week.  Until then…