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Gaby,
I’m not too far out on a limb here to say that your northerly location would require a deeper trench than 4 feet for the water and drain lines, plus, are you sure you want to run electricity that close to your plumbing? But you’re right, you’ll get clickage on this for sure.
MD
Replies
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Gaby,
I'm not too far out on a limb here to say that your northerly location would require a deeper trench than 4 feet for the water and drain lines, plus, are you sure you want to run electricity that close to your plumbing? But you're right, you'll get clickage on this for sure.
MD
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Gaby,
To get things rolling answer these questions for us about your plans for "water" and "electricity" in your new garage.
1. Toilet (yes/no).
2. Hand washing basin or vanity (yes/no).
3. Utility sink (yes/no).
4. Shower (yes/no).
5. Hot water (yes/no).
6. Do you plan to wash cars inside your garage in the winter (yes/no). If yes, can you drain the waste water into the public sewer in your building jurisdiction (yes/no).
7. How many amps of electrical service will you need? Will you need 220/240 service for power tools or heating?
8. Does your existing electric service and entry have sufficient capacity for this new load.
9. Will you be heating the entire garage or just the space where the plumbing is located?
10. What will you be using a a source of heat?
11. In addition to water and electricity, have you considered telephone and even cable TV?
In general, subslab drain lines do not require maintenance and you should not worry about accessing them. You can bring your electric lines through conduit that runs all of the way to a sub-pannel in the garage. Again, I would not worry about access for maintenance. I do not like to turn plumbing or electrical conduit up into exterior walls if it can be avoided. Try to bring them up in an interior wall. In the ground and under the slab you should run Type M copper protected by and insulated with rubatex. If you are concerned about freezing check into the posibility of pulling PEX tubing through conduit. It should pull through electrical sweeps. Inside run your plumbing lines in the walls. For access, run behind screwed on plywood wainscoting.
Did something very similiar a couple of years ago. Not particularly difficult but to get a good result you have to plan ahead and sweat the details.
Steve
*Aaaallllrighty then! I set the odometer. Let's see how far this puppy goes.To answer the questions:No1,3,5: YesNo 6: Yes but not sure about city code yet. Will find out. Let's assume it's allowed for now.No 7: 80 amps with 220/240No 8: Existing panel cam handle it (200 amp panel). I'm not using half of that.No 9: Heating entire garageNo 10: Most probably a combination of electric and wood stove. Electricity when I'm not there (at low temp). Wood stove when I am.No 11: Only telephone cableDog Man, my main water entrance into the house right now is at about 4 feet from grade. I will check with the city for the right depth. How far apart should water lines and electricity be (I suppose I should check with the city). I could split the trench up into two rows. What do you think.BTW, I will be contacting the city to make sure that everything is to code. I need a plan to get their approval. ThanksGaby
*Gaby: We have a warehouse across the street from our shop. We basically did the same thing you are considering. The side street between our buildings is gravel so we trenched in the services as you plan to do. We do not keep the warehouse heated all the time so we wanted access to our water & electrical too. We installed a pit in the ground brought all the services into it and then distributed into the building from there. The top is our concrete floor with a small access hatch with a cover& ladder into the pit. We used concrete for the pit simply because we have the forms. You could use block, a large culvert, pre-fab pit, or anything else that would suit you for the pit. This is not the most economical route but it has worked well for us. Just one idea. Enjoy your new shop. Ron
*Gaby: My first post is not worded very good. We ran our elect. in the same trench with the water but when we got close to the building we branched off the elect. conduit and ran it direct into the building up a wall & into a sub panl. It is not in the pit. Ron
*Gaby,Check with local codes on separation of potable water lines from sewer line (horizontal and vertical). Will you need both a storm sewer connection and sanitary sewer connection due to the combination of floor drain, toilet, sink, etc? Will an RPZ be required for your water service to the garage? Will you have sufficient pitch from the garage to the sewer service outlet in the house or will all waste have to be pumped from an ejector? I'd run a few extra conduits while the trench is open for spares. Material is cheap, trenching is not.EB
*I am thinking about doing the same thing, only the distances will be a bit greater. One thing that someone mentioned some time back is that when you fill the trench back in, put in some type of "flagging" material so that some future back hoe or Ditch Witch operator will know that they are about to mow through some rather expensive stuff. I don't know what the best stuff to use to say "STOP" would be, but perhaps the plastic "CAUTION" tape or similar would be better than nothing. If you can't make your runs in a straight line but have to snake around something, you may want to note it somehow by the garage sub-panel and/or where things emerge in the basement for future generations to ponder.I like the idea of running everything through conduit. Hadn't thought about running Pex through conduit before, but that is a very interesting idea. You would need one conduit for the phone (whoops, communications circuits) and one for the power, but in the future when you wanted to run a 100 amps for your super powered welder and extend your home computer/AV network to the shop, it would easy to upgrade things. You might want to slope things so that condensation or leakage could drain out of the conduits in your basement. I don't recall what you guys use up there in place of the NEC, but you will probably need a separate or additional grounding rod at the garage. You might check into including it as part of the foundation of the garage so you won't have to bash a six foot rod into the ground when you install your electrical service. With the NEC, it is my understanding (and, again, I am not an electrician even though I play one around my house) that you can run either a two hot wires plus ground or a two hots, neutral, and ground from your main panel to the sub panel in the garage. In the case of a three wire cable, the ground and neutral at the garage are bonded, in the case of the four wire cable, the neutral is not bonded at the garage but only back at the main panel. This, of course, is subject to the interpretations and whims of your local inspectors. You will probably be required or at least want to have a disconnect in the garage as well as a breaker in the main panel which feeds the sub-panel. (I don't know if the "rule of six" could come into play on the sub, but I wouldn't want to do it that way, anyway.) I don't have my wire charts here, so I don't know if you would be required to derate your conductors for 40' or not. If you run them in sch-80 PVC, I have been told that you may have to derate your conductors because of the insulating value of the PVC conduit. Of course, with only 40' of wire, I am guessing that going up an extra size isn't going to break the piggy bank.
*When I built onto my garageI bored a hole under my sidewalk from my basement to my garage with a pvc pipe less than 8'. I used 4" pvc as a conduit for hot &cold water the phone and a drain from the sink plus a wire for an outdoor lite. Inside the garage is a hole in the dirt that i filled with packing peanuts to keep the dirt from caving in and if I need access the hole just suck em up with the shop vac. The hole is about 3' deep and about 18" square , I poured the floor and used 2xs as a cover for the hole.
*Gaby, I did darn near the same thing last summer, with a twist. We moved the power/phone utilities to the garage and wired it back to the house from there. Water was run to the garage and back (explain later) and waste was run from the garage to the house. Little over 30 feet.The real twist in our case is the house and garage are connected by a heated breezeway. Everything is still buried, but being a permanent structure connecting the two solved a good many "code" problems (like depth of the waste pipe).Electrical:A meter and 200 amp panel were put on the wall closest to the alley (farthest from the house). A second 60 amp generator switch panel was also added here. The house (complete gut and rewire) got a 150 Amp service in the basement which is being fed by one monster of an armour cable from a breaker on the garage panel. There's also a 60 amp panel in the basement of the house being fed by a more reasonably sized cable from the generator panel in the garage. I don't think the the breezeway had any bearing on the electrical requirements. For no particular reason I tried to space the two power cables 2 - 3 feet apart before burying. Phone and cable I plan to snake down a 1.5" conduit which I laid just under the breezeway slab. Where the cables entered the wall, I just built them up thickly with spray foam to allow for some earth movement.Waste:I wanted floor drains in the garage (radiant heat) as well as a washing sink and the posibility of a toilet. The only way to do this within code was to drain all the floor drains to an oil separating sump pit (that's a whole nother story). Put basically from the pit to the house is standard plumbing. Don't forget a vent stack in the garage. Because I'm running under the heated breezeway, there were no restrictions on minimum depth. If it were a detached garage, I think the code around here says a minimum 8' and there's no way I would have been able to slope the distance without making the house end un-workable. As it is, we had an alternate stack placed reasonably close to the garage side wall of the basement when we excavated and repoured the basement floor the previous year (it's been a long renovation). The garage drain simply tied into this alternate stack. 3" ABS waste pipe all around. I received quite a bit of conflicting information about cleanouts and spacing. In the end I just told the plumber what I wanted and left it to him to ensure it met codes. He didn't install any extra cleanouts between the pit in the garage and the stack in the house. Where the pipe enters the wall I placed strip of geo-span above and below it just in case there's ground movement.Water:One of our goals with this project was to put all the utilities in a shed room off the garage including moving the boiler/hot water combo into the garage as well. This means we needed to run a hot and return heating loop for the boiler as well as the water from house to garage, DWH from the garage to the house, a DWH recirculating pipe, and then three more water lines just for good measure (thinking about putting a water softener and filter in the garage as well). All of these lines were done with an assortment of sizes of pex (Rehau). 1" for the boiler lines, 1" for the water main going to the garage and 3/4" for everthing else but the hot water recirc (1/2"). I built a box to hold, insulate and protect these pipes. 3/4" PTW ply was ripped lengthwise to 2' widths then screwed to 2x4 PTW studs on edge. 3 studs, one inside each edge and one down the middle. It's simpler than I make it out to sound, but basically one be honkin wooden trough. The box was laid out with the top off, and all of the above mentioned pipes laid in and spaced and then the cavity of the box was completely shot full of spray foam to insulate them. Insulating the box and tubes was a trial and disaster process, much more complicated than I make it sound. The top of the box was screwed down and the whole thing buried. I only put the pipes deep enough to get them under the garage foundation (grade beam) and the usual 1/4" slope towards the house. They don't need to be sloped, but you never know when you might want to drain the lines. Where the pipes enter the basement wall, I took a few precautions. I dug down a square deep enough for 4" of geo-span, and 6" concrete. I had the the concrete sub dowel into the foundation wall and bar up a pad. The box containing the pipes was laid right over this pad and bolted down to it. The idea is, the earth can shift the box up and down if it has to, but not right at the point where they enter the wall. I didn't want anything sheared off.All of my pipes were put through holes in the foundation wall. Initially, I considered cutting out notches in the foundation wall, but luckily sanity found me. The contractor was responsible for holes for the waste and electrical. He paid a specialist to core the holes. No fuss no muss (except for that morning I found a puddle in the trench and suspected one of the locals had stopped for a P*@#, it was really just the water from the hole boring). I was responsible for the heating and water. I rented a hammer drill and spent an afternoon venting the weeks' office frustrations. I used a 2" bit, and give or take a little noise and dust, it really wasn't a chore.The contractor just smiled and shook his head at each new pipe I laid down, but I'm happy with the end results. If you want to see how I did it, send me an email and I'll digitize some of the photos. Good luck.
*I really apprciate the help guys. There are a lot of good ideas here and stuff that I never thought about. I gotta go mull through all of this and put together a good plan. When I finalize things I'll show you the plan and you guys can give it your seal "of approval"...or not! (hee..hee)Thanks againGaby
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Let's see how much "Klickage" I get out of this one.
I plan to build my detached garage this spring. It's about 40 ft from the house and I want to have both water and elctricity in it. I'm looking for some good solutions because I have some restrictions as to how I can do it. Here's what I came up with so far so let me know if I'm headed in the right direction or not.
My main concern is the drain line because I don't have the room to bring it out to the street. I would have to rip up my driveway to do that. I can however bring it to the house in a straight line. I plan to dig a trench about 4 ft deep, cut through the foundation and footing and connect it to the main drain of the house. While I have the trench dug I can install the neccessary conduits for the water supply and electricity. All of these lines would come through the founadtion wall. I'm not too sure what to do when all the lines are at the garage. They will be 4 feet below the grade of the slab and I'm not sure how to bring them inside and still have access to the pipes and cables.
If this isn't very clear let me know and I'll try to post a picture. Thanks guys.
Gaby