The Shed: It’s Electric!

After recently digging trenches in ridiculous heat, this recent effort took place in more normal summer heat – around 86F and super humid. Tolerable in comparison! The project for the next two days was to “tie in” the new electric sub-panel in the shed. Basically, I’d run all the lines from the main panel in the house to the shed and now it was time to connect them. With lots of rain in the forecast, it was a good plan to be doing indoor work (but it was really just a happy accident.)

There was one last outdoor effort, so I started on that – adding a new ground for the shed. For reasons not worth explaining, I made the decision to give the shed a separate earth ground rather than run a fourth line through the conduit. Driving a ten foot copper rod into the earth shouldn’t be that big a deal, but here we are on a retired blue stone quarry where there are stones everywhere. The short story is that I got the rod about half way in (~4′-5′) FIVE TIMES before hitting a rock that I couldn’t navigate so I remove the rod each time and tried again. On the sixth attempt, I drove it home and attached the ground wire from the rod to the sub-panel before properly burying the rod cap.

This image shows a work in progress, the finished wiring was “neater” in the box, but here’s what happened. Due to the delays in getting the ground rod done, I was behind schedule with plans to sleep in the shed for the first time. In order to do that, I really needed power to be comfortable – for lighting, phone charging, and, oh yeah, air conditioning! (Did I mention it was sticky weather?) Then, as I was completing the tie-in, I realized that I forgot to buy an actual electrical outlet for the shed! I had everything else, so I figured I drop by the local home store after dinner forgetting it was Sunday night and they close early. So after dinner, I powered off a circuit in the house, removed an outlet from that circuit, and installed it in the shed to both test my work and give me power for my first night.

Lo an behold, everything worked and this circuit tester confirms correct wiring! My neighbor, patiently waiting to have a celebratory bourbon once the wiring was confirmed, came by to see if I needed help just before we confirmed my work. We agreed that getting the A/C unit in the window and running would be best done before the bourbon, so we unpacked the unit, made a few silly assembly mistakes, and ultimately got the unit into the window and running. By now it was about 10:30 PM, so a celebratory bourbon was definitely in order.

After a bourbon and some conversation, I made my way back to my new Tiny House and tried to get a bit organized and comfortable. It was a bit of a mess after the rush to finish the work, so I saved most of the organizing for the next day and got onto the air mattress to see how sleeping in a shed was going to work out.