Septic wiring - 6 - inspection

Previously: torque

When everything was finally wired up, I called in for an inspection. 

The electrical trade is regulated by the state around here - Department of Labor and Industries. You can apply for a permit online in about 10 minutes. Then you print out the permit and post it on the job site. They also give you a secret code to request inspections or change the permit. They do *not* email this information to you. If you lose it, there's no easy way to get it back.

I lost my secret code. To request an inspection, I had to call and leave a message. 

The next day I went to the site and worked a bit on the yurt. At one point I saw an official-looking pickup truck turn around in the driveway and take off. Wait! Don't go, I'm right here! I tried to chase them down but no luck. I called the L&I office, and found out they had no record of me requesting an inspection. Bummer. They put me down for the next day.

The inspector was very nice, full of good advice. He rejected my work, though, because I actually *did* need a ground wire from the subpanel back to the main panel, *in addition* to the ground rods. Belt-and-suspenders. I shoulda gotten that 2-2-2-4 from the Home Depot. 

Luckily I had left a pull string in the conduit. (Mason's line. It's cheap and strong.) Unluckily, I had dropped one end down the conduit a couple days before. Oops! To get it out, I taped a scrap of 3/4" conduit to the shop vac hose, stuck it down the conduit, and picked up the string. To stop that from happening, I tied the ends of the pull strings to little pieces of 3/4" conduit.

At the local hardware store I bought a new ground wire - #10 copper, 170' long, $80. We used that to pull the copper through, connected it on both ends, and called in another inspection. This time I passed. Yay! 

Here's the main panel. You can see the large aluminum feeders to the subpanel, and the copious spare wire to the receptacle on that post. You can also see an unused conduit for another subpanel that I plan to install soon.

The subpanel. Note the neutral bus bar on the right, and the ground bus bar on the left.

The completed septic alarm/control box. Note the grey duct seal goop on the conduits going to the septic system, to stop "corrosive gasses" from getting in to the panel. On the left is the documentation for all the electronics, stuffed in to the box for future reference.