Despite the irony of the title – electricity was an inevitable next step in the water infrastructure. The basic needs was to get an electric outlet for the pump. However I decided to take it one step further and install additional power outlets that would be available in the fields (so that I wouln’t have to stretch out long extension cords). So I set out to put in power adapters in both the flow junction concrete box and in the pump concrete box. Though it should have been a straightforward task I did run into a few difficulties and learned a few lessons worth mentioning.
Electric Cable
We purchased a 200 meter roll of three wire cable. I don’t remember the exact specification – but I do remember we chose the one with thicker diameter wires (also more expensive) that were rated for a higher current. I would have wanted to put in more then one supply cable – but the cost was prohibitive.
Much later I learned that there is a 5 wire cable which is usually used for three-phase electric installations. However, I believe it can used as if it were three separate electric cables bound into one. The ground and zero wires are shared and then there are three current supply wires.
I don’t have a specific short-term need for this in mind, however it isn’t every day that you dig a 60 meter long, 1 meter deep trench on your property. So there’s that 🙂
Burying Electric Cable
The cable was buried alongside the water pipe. To protect it we purchased a ribbed plastic tube (2×100 meters length) meant to protect it.
The cable was a perfect fit in the protective tube. As a result, getting the cable into the tube was hard work. Rather then going into the details of how we did it (hint: using a pull-wire and cutting the protective tube into manageable segments) I would suggest getting a more spacious tube. I thought about this when we purchased ours but I thought that a tight fit would offer better protection to the cable. I still think that too large a tube, with too much free space, may collapse under the pressure of the earth and may give out sooner.
Modularity
For the better part of a day I struggled in vain to get the electric-accessories (splitter box and sockets) installed. I wired them together indoors and then headed out to fit them into the concrete walls. Remembers this is work done in a confined underground space. I failed … completely. I couldn’t get is assembled in place.
After a long and mostly fruitless day I realized I had been going about this the hard way. It dawned on me that I could do most of the assembly work inside if I were to simply mount the electric-accessories onto a wood panel and then simply mount that panel on the concretewalls. So, the next day I tried this and it worked like a charm. I predrilled the panels in place and then worked comfortably on them indoors. These are the two panels prepared for installation.
The only electric fitting I had to do underground was to connect the ends of the buried cabled to these boxes. In the image below you can see that I left empty sockets on the left hand side – so all I needed was a screwdriver and a few minutes of work.
Since our electricity infrastructure is outdated and partially improvised this entire supply line is simply plugged into an existing power outlet.