Electrical upgrades

General
1

People have been asking for electrical upgrades for a while. I would like some help planning and installing the next round of electrical outlets.

I have what we need laid out on the wiki for the electrical system: http://wiki.hive13.org/view/Electrical_System

The current situation boils down to this:
6 spots left on the sub panel in the utility closet.
We must have two spots for a 220V drop in the fab lab for the new laser.
Four other spots are needed for outlets around the space where people have asked for them.
We need to add in a few new lighting fixtures to make some of the areas less dark.

Several people have mentioned that we should bring a new sub panel in to the dirty room and that honestly looks like a pretty decent option. If we don’t we are pretty much done with adding any new wiring/outlets to the space.

Only downside it that a subpanel will probably start us off at $600+ just to get it in the dirty room. Add probably at least another $600-800 or more for the outlets, light fixtures, etc.

Anyone have any thoughts on this? I want to get this ball rolling since the new laser will be dead on arrival for us if we don’t get a 220v outlet installed in there.

Thanks!
Jon

2

Does anyone have a decent clamp on meter we can use to measure the lighting circuit and the load on the whole breaker box?

3

Yes. We should do it. We need another outlet over in the kitchen. As we can’t run the microwave and the ac at the same time.

4

John, I’d say just buy an $8 clampy meter at harbor freight. This is not precision work, and not more than 400amps (right?). So that’ll (I’ve heard they work pretty well). Might be useful for the space to have around anyway - never know…

5

I am checking with my father. I am sure he has most tools needed for electrical work. He has offered before to help he just won’t run the wire (he will even tell us proper way to run it)

If you want I can get an email started between all of us who is interested on working on this, he isn’t on the list. Or i can just relay messages.

6

I have one of those cheap HF clamp meters down here at the space already. It used to live with the rest of the multimeters on the electronics bench, but moved into my toolbox during a round of organization some months ago.

I’ve returned it to the multimeter tub by the electronics bench.

  • Ry
7

I have a pretty nice millwalke one if I can find the charger it takes the lipo battery packs I’ll bring it to the meeting

8

Just an update for the mailing list:

Greg updated the electrical system on the wiki so it has a lot more info (awesome!!): http://wiki.hive13.org/view/Electrical_System

We have all of the planned done outlets except for one in the dirty room. I’ve installed two lights, still have two left.

If you have any other places where outlets seem like they may be useful be awesome and add it to the “Needed upgrades” section on the wiki page.

Hats off to Greg who did a huge, huge portion of the work!

Jon