A $10 Fix to a HUGE PROBLEM (EXPOSED Electrical Service)

hey gang i'm paul with studpack welcome back to our channel we're back on our 1981 kitchen remodel project today and we have two projects that involve concrete and pipe in one of them we're going to fill the pipe with concrete and in the other one we're going to encase the pipe with concrete so the first one is this old six inch pvc pipe that is under the slab and pops up in the kitchen you may have seen it in the demo video and this was the exhaust duct for an old gen air downdraft range it must have been all the rage in the early 80s i can kind of remember that but our new range is going to have a vent hood through the roof now that we're comfortable doing roof fence we're super confident we can tackle this one that roof's pretty steep but it's a huge attic and the funny thing is about this neighborhood you drive around you see one of these in everybody's flower bed it's the funniest thing i've ever seen and to boot it off there's no screen or anything to prevent critters from going in there and they always get full of water so we're going to dig this out cut off this 90 way down here but before we start on that let's head to the backyard and we'll show you our second project today alrighty guys our second project has to do with the underground electrical service for this home it's coming up underground into this conduit into our meter and then my electrician pointed this out right here and this is actually a very common problem where we live this two inch galvanized pipe is completely rotten through look at that so water's getting in here now and then that's very dangerous you have these sharp metal edges right there by the incoming service so at the bottom of this pipe there should be a 90 in the ground pointed to the pad transformer so all the utilities are underground in this subdivision so somewhere around here there's a pad transformer feeding several homes and that 90 is going to be pointed to that transformer and then the electrical service is underground direct burial all the way to the transformer so that's why it's super important whenever you're digging a hole to call 811 to have your utilities located because you could easily cut through these lines with the blade of a shovel so all we're going to do we're going to dig this out a bit we're going to build a little form put this where it goes wrap it with duct tape and encase it in concrete so make sure you stay tuned to the end of the video i have a very funny story straight out of the tv series home improvement about something that happened to me with a pipe just like this and our local utility company but right now let's head back to the front yard and start digging up that ductwork [Music] right [Music] hey [Music] all right both sides of that pipe are cut off where we want them flush inside and just below ground here but look at all the water in there that thing's almost full there's a lot more water in there than i thought but i was anticipating that and i brought this pump i actually just picked this up from lowe's like two weeks ago and i've already used it to pump out a toilet uh an outdoor fountain and now some underground ductwork so let's pump that water out of there [Music] all right that pump works great there's lake i see about half an inch of water right here but the pipes pitch this way so i'm not worried about it it's going to get pushed out by the concrete anyway so how much concrete do we need i think we've all been to the store two or three times in a day because we didn't get enough of something or we got the wrong something or we forgot something well i don't want to go back so i figured out the volume of that pipe using a simple equation so first you need to know the area and that's pi r squared so the radius of this is three inches but we need to express that in feet because we're working with cubic feet of concrete everything needs to be in terms of a foot so three inches is point two five of a foot point two five squared times pi times twelve feet gives me right at two point four cubic feet of concrete each eighty pound bag will do 0.6 cubic feet 0.6 times 4 is 2.4 it worked out perfectly so i got four bags for this and i got one bag for the pipe in the backyard and i got one extra and i can always return it so let's get our hose set up our wheelbarrow all our tools and start filling this thing up with concrete [Music] [Music] all right we know that pipe is now completely full of concrete for two reasons number one we used right at four bags of concrete just like our formula told us it would and then we also know it's full because all the concrete we put in from this end pushed all that water that was in the pipe the amount we couldn't pump out it pushed it out the other end so we're really confident that thing's full awesome so we'll clean this up tomorrow put that dirt back and we are done with this right now let's head to the backyard and tackle that conduit alrighty gang before we start on this project this reminds me of something that happened to me about 30 years ago my wife and i were just newlyweds and we were in our first house and i think i was adding photocells to the outside of the house to turn on the lights when the sun went down it was after work it was at night i was in the attic working and i knew i had to cut a piece of romex to tie into it i had turned off all the circuits that i thought it might be but that line was hot and i cut it and it was hot and sparked just like in our last and one just like in one of the last videos we did but i was okay i thought the worst that can happen i'll trip the breaker but when i was up there the attic light dimmed about halfway and after a few seconds the whole house went dark just because of one cable that i cut my wife was downstairs she said uh paul something's wrong so she came up and got me with a flashlight i went downstairs and like i said the whole house no power so i got my meter out took the cover off the panel out in the storeroom and i was getting some strange voltages like 67 volts 30 volts so i called a buddy of mine who owned an electrical contracting company he says sounds like you lost a phase now i know a house is split phase it's line a and line b but i call them phases we lost the line or a phase coming into our house and what happened this steel pipe like i said in the beginning of the video is supposed to have a 90 that faces the transformer so when the wire comes out of that pipe it's a nice gradual bend my house didn't have that 90. so the sharp edge of this pipe had nicked the insulation on one of the feeder cables and when i cut that wire that surge finished it off and it grounded itself to this pipe so i lost half of my incoming power that makes sense so the guy said just call the utility company in the morning so my wife called me later that day actually she paged me back before we had phone she paid me i called her said the utility company is here and they're digging up our whole backyard they changed our whole service from the transformer to the meter underground because i cut one cable just like from the show home improvement so nowadays this is pvc don't really have this problem but we got to fix this so let's start digging [Music] [Music] [Music] so [Music] all right that came out great what a simple answer for something that could be really complicated to fix right less than twelve dollars i'd say a material something you might even have in your garage some wood to build a form out of a bag of concrete and some duct tape now you'll notice in the time lapse i was very careful right here i even started digging with my trowel because i knew we had their ethernet cable it actually ended up under our form so we moved it out of the way so in case there's ever a problem with that it's not under that concrete then we ran into the ground rod on this right hand side so we made our form a little bit more narrow so that ground rod wasn't in the concrete but that would actually be okay so we're gonna let this sit up overnight come back tomorrow pull that form off and show you the final result alrighty gang it's the next day it actually rained last night so the rain coming off of this roof splashed some mud on there but that's all right we'll clean it up let's take our form off and see how we did easy all right let's put this dirt back and give that thing a quick rinse cool [Music] alrighty gang we're all wrapped up here now you may have noticed we didn't put any rebar in there really wouldn't matter in an application like this but if you have some laying around the shop go ahead and throw it in there but let's head to the front yard right now and put the dirt back in that other hole up here in the front yard you'll notice i threw the dirt on this tarp that's just going to make it a lot easier to clean up instead of that mess we had in the backyard because of that rain last night there we go all right can't even tell we were here and that's how we like it so we actually saved up two concrete projects and did them at the same time so we're more efficient that way so the homeowner told us we saved him 30 minutes a month or about six hours a year just by filling this up and we asked him why he said well it fills up with water i can tell when it needs emptying because when the exhaust fan's on it'll start to gurgle so he'd have to come out here with his shop back and he would fill it up one and a half times with water vacuuming that thing out and we actually found a part to his vacuum cleaner in that pipe and we gave it back to him and if you notice that wheelbarrow that we were using it has two wheels if you don't have a wheelbarrow yet and you're gonna go get one get one with two wheels it is so much easier you're not going to be struggling to balance that load especially if you're moving concrete and that's really called a roofer's wheelbarrow the the guys who do flat roofs they use those up there so the weight in the wheelbarrow is on two wheels instead of one and does less damage to the roof that's gonna be a wrap on this video guys find that like button for us build a form around it pump it full of concrete ask us a question drop us a comment and subscribe if you haven't already we really appreciate that and we will see you on the next one [Music] you

Channel: Stud Pack

Views: 37,643

Rating: 4.9607019 out of 5

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Id: 9M5TTk1TgDI

Length: 13min 24sec (804 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 09 2021