5 Essentials You Need When Bringing Electricity From Your Home to Your Work Shop
If you're building a workshop, a detached garage or another outbuilding, you may want to run power from your home to that building. In order to do that, you need the right supplies. Here are some essentials.
1. Permit
Often, you need to get an electrical permit before you run permanent wires from your home to an outbuilding. Check with the council in your area to see if you need a permit. Alternatively, if you hire an electrical contractor to do the work for you, they can arrange all the permits you need.
2. Dedicated Circuit
In some cases, you can connect the wiring for the shed to the circuit breaker in your home. However, in other cases, you may want to set up a dedicated circuit. Ultimately, you have to assess the current load, the load capacity of the circuit, and whether or not adding the additional wiring will overload the existing circuit. If your current panel is full, you may have to put in a new panel for the new circuit.
3. Rigid Metal Conduit
Once you figure out whether or not you are going to add a circuit, you can finally start running wires from your home to the shed. To protect the wires, you need to run them through conduit. To save time, you may want to use rigid metal conduit rather than plastic conduit.
Under most building codes, you don't have to bury rigid metal conduit as deeply as you do plastic conduit. That saves time on labour, and the time savings generally helps to balance out the extra cost associated with metal conduit over plastic.
4. Residual Current Device
This helps to ensure that too much power never runs through your wires and causes anyone to get electrocuted by the outlets or wires in your workshop. Depending on the voltage you are running over your wires, you may need to install a residual current device on the breaker itself or a earth leakage device or ground fault circuit interrupter in the shop near the outlet.
5. Fish Tape
Regardless of any protective elements you have to put in place, you need to be able to pull the wires through the conduit. There is special fish tape that you can use for this purpose. There are also foam "mice" that feature a small hook to connect the wires to, and then, you pull them through the conduit using the suction power of a shop vac.