Now that we had our cable trenched and laid in, we needed to hook it up to our “temporary” panel. I use quotes around the word temporary because it both is and isn’t. It will be temporary while it is in the shed, but once the cabin is up it will then become the electric panel for the cabin. At that point, we’ll just disconnect it from the shed, dig up the cable, and trench 20 feet or so to the cabin. You see? There is a method to my madness. Instead of doing a separate, outdoor temporary panel, this way we could use the same one and not have to trench the whole length later.
That said, it was a bear to install the panel. More correctly, not the panel itself but the cable to the panel. We used 4/0, 4/0, 2/0 aluminum URD cable from the meter to our panel. This is suitable for underground burial and rated for our 200 amp service. The problem is that the cable is actually 3 cables, and they’re big. Big, and un-pliable. Stiff, you could say. Fitting them up the conduit pipe, bending it 90 degrees into the shed, and another 90 degrees down to the panel was difficult to say the least. Thankfully, I was blessed to have Bre accompany me for this task. She just finished a week of finals and had the opportunity to help – and I was glad to have it. Working together, we were able to fit the cable up the conduit, into the shed, and down to the lugs in the panel.
We also drove 5/8″ grounding rods, 8 feet long into the ground so that our grounding cable could be attached to that. We were then able to hook up the existing wiring in the shed to the new breakers in the panel. All that is left for us to do is to schedule our inspection. If that is approved, we then only have to hook up the other end of the service cable to the meter, and that will be a monumental achievement for us!