Beeeutiful!

Now, before we got this house, I did not consider myself a connoisseur of exciting things like... electrical panel boxes. Conduit. 200 amp service. Neatly wired junction boxes. Labels on stuff in the panel box. 50 and 30 amp outlets. Whether or not you need a GFCI outlet or an arc-fault breaker. You get the picture.

But now... now, not only do I find beauty in nice electrical work, I also look at other people's electrical panels to see how they are wired. "Wow, look at how neatly that conduit has been run," I said to the hubby the other day while we were driving past an impressive setup on 35th street. On one hand I suppose it's kinda ridiculous, but on the other hand, I now have a much, much better appreciation of a master electrician's handy work.

Let me 'splain.

Look at my beeeutiful new 200 amp meter and can (top). Under which lies the panel with the cutoff switch to the house, with space for the cutoff to the (as yet nonexistent) barn and the guest house.

At the bottom, we had a 50 amp, 30 amp, and 110 plug installed. The 50 amp and 30 amp are for RV plugins (we have a truck camper and the NC in-laws have a very large RV that needs a 50 amp), and the 110 is for plugging in anything else that might need to be plugged in.

Check out that pretty green sticker. That says "City of Austin INSPECTED." We're actually legal now!

New pole on the roof gets us the 15 feet of overhead clearance that we're supposed to have. Woohoo!

The shiny new panel box for the house. We had to put it outside because you need 3 feet of clearance in front of any panel box to meet code, and we didn't have that inside the utility room.

And look! Everything is sooo neatly labeled and everything! There's even plenty of room to expand when we put on the addition.

It's just to the left of where the meter, can, and one sub-panel used to be (you can see it on the left of the picture). We'll have a mason come out and brick this in.

Remember this mess? Three panel boxes on the inside wall?

Now it looks like this. Obviously I have to replace the drywall and all, but it's so neat!

Junction box (neatly labeled, you can see it in the picture above) on the inside wall.

Here are the old panel boxes that got pulled out.

And remember the leaning posts of Pisa? Notice the fantastic electrical line that it's "supporting". We took both the overhead wire and the two backmost telephone poles out. (I didn't take a picture of the finished product, but here's the before picture.)

So, we have 200 amp electric! Now, you too can come over and admire my beeeutiful panel boxes, conduit, and other stuff! Just don't look at the inside of the house, OK?