Pulling Wire Like a Pro - Tips and tricks for pulling conductors through conduit

what's going on my friends this is dustin selzer with electrician you and today we're going to talk about pulling wire like a pro pulling wire through conduit can be a huge pain in the ass if you don't know what you're doing it can be a pain even if you do know what you're doing sometimes we pull really really big conductors through really really small conduit now there are some rules and we'll cover that here in a second how much you're supposed to fill a conduit what size conductors all of that jazz there is a method to it but even if you know the rules the methodology and how you pull conductors and what your partner does and you know whether or not you use lube how many bends there are there's a lot to consider to not be sitting there sweating and dying out in the heat trying to do this and killing yourself there's easy methods to do this so the first thing to talk about is the conductors and the conduit right every type of conductor is going to be a little bit different when you're pulling it because the insulation might be a little bit bigger a little bit different the stranding of the conductor you might have solid conductors that you're pulling in you might have stranded conductors you may have compact stranded conductors so the flexibility of the conductors might change whether or not the conductors start to twist and wrap around each other might change whether you've got all your couplings you know tightly bound up or whether or not there's little jagged edges whether you reamed the inside of your your conduit out so you clean the edges so that the conduit doesn't or the conductors don't get stuck um so there's less drag there's all kinds of different things so let's start with the with the conduit conduits the types kind of matter so uh if you're doing stuff with pvc you're gonna notice it feels different to pull conductors through uh something than it would for like emt or if you have a flexible conduit if you're doing car flex or if you have flexible metal conduit we call it flex but it's like a corrugated kind of flexible conduit so you're not going to be able to pull any conductors through that if there's already bends made on it so you gotta get the whole thing straightened out and then sit and run fish tape through it and try to get two people on either end so there's different conduits that are gonna come into play for how difficult it is to do a wire pull also with conduit the size matters so i try not to run half inch anything ever that's just my rule of thumb half inch a lot of times is difficult to even push wire through by yourself over you know a relatively short distance especially if you're up on lifts and you've got any kind of bends whatsoever half inch is just a huge pain it's more work than it's worth so the difference in cost uh if we're not talking about running like 30 miles of conduit that would add up obviously if you're going from half inch to three quarter and you can get away with half inch because you're only pulling a circuit through each one then obviously just go half inch i'm just saying as a preference i try not to run half inch because things end up getting caught up more than not the three quarter just there's extra room so that's another kind of rule of thumb i like to upsize my conduit if i can if it's practical um you know if i only need like one inch conduit i'm not gonna put four inch in like that's not what i'm talking about but if i'm running one inch i might go to inch and a quarter just i'll go up a size if i'm running you know big conductors and it's an underground pole or something like that if it's an inch and a half i might run two instead that's just a personal preference thing but unless we're talking about right now the slice of time in which covid is making conduit very expensive every other time other than that there's not really that huge of a price difference from like one size to the next i understand right now prices are bananas and they will go back as soon as everything gets backed up but i just in general it's okay to upsize your conduits so if we're talking about the conduit size it's also a good thing to mention that there are uh charts in the national electric code that talk about how many conductors of what size can go into what conduit there's annex c and there's chapter nine several different tables in there the intent of this video is not to show you guys how to do that i do have a video on my channel if you go to youtube go to electrician you channel and you can search for conduit fill today we're going to talk about conduit fill but how full you make a conduit also matters the number of conductors that you stick in there now also in code [Music] for ridgid we are in 344.26 bends number in one run there shall not be more than the equivalent of four quarter bends or 360 degrees total between pull points for example conduit bodies and boxes and the reason is at a certain point it becomes so difficult to pull that you start yanking and you can start to damage the insulation you start rubbing it too much on the conduit pulling it through sharp edges just stretching it out like wrapping around your hand bending it all like you start to mess up the insulation and the other thing to think about is that somebody might have to pull the conductors out at some point or add some more down the line and if you've got conductors already in the conduit and you're trying to add to it and you've got like 720 degrees worth of bends you're screwing everybody over in the future so there's reason why it is code so no more than 490s or all of the angles if you got a couple of 45s and 30s and some kicks and stuff all of it in total between one pull point and another pull point uh you can't have more than four bends now if you've got like six pull points you can have 360 between each one of the pull points that's fine it's not saying the whole run it's just saying where it's accessible to feed wire in and pull out you can't have more than 360 degrees of bends so on that note as well let's talk about the conductors the amount of conductors that you can put in a conduit i'm not going to break in detail about it but there is a general table in chapter 9 table 1 that says that we need to use if you're putting more than two conductors in the cross-sectional area or percentage of the conductors of the conduit that you can fill is only forty percent so forty percent of the total conduit is how full how many conductors we can put in so all of the sizing to figure all that out is further in chapter nine and annex c uh but there is a kind of cross sectional area number and it goes into if you're doing a nipple which is any conduit that's 24 inches or less that there's a little bit more of an allowance because it's just such a small area so they're not as worried about it as they are for a really long pull where it's going to be really difficult because you're adding all that weight and length of conductor now the other thing that we can talk about are the types of conductors that we're trying to pull so we could be pulling solid we could be pulling stranded we have compact stranded um the flexibility of the conductors is one thing to to take note of typically i try not to run any solid conductors through conduit it depends on the circumstances if i'm working alone and i have you know no help to pull and i'm up on a lift or something it's more beneficial for me to push the conductors from where i'm standing all the way to the other end and i can see at the other end and pop out in a situation like that i'll probably use solid because the same thing is trying to fish a fish tape it's which is a solid wire so putting three conductors together that are all solid is easier to get over there so that's usually the only time that i'll use solid unless maybe i just have a bunch of solids laying around i have nothing else to use i might also use it then but i prefer to use stranded when i'm pulling conductors through conduit they're just a lot more flexible they kind of bend and make corners easier um it kind of sucks dealing with stranded when you're at the reels because they end up getting tangled a lot when they're coming off the reel whereas solid kind of keeps its form so as it comes off the reel it doesn't really like tangle sometimes it does but nowhere near as bad so it's really just a matter of preference there's no like code reason why you should use solid or stranded or one or the other it's just a matter of preference but one thing to keep in mind is when you're pulling the difficulty of the pull or the challenges are still there depending on if it's solid or stranded conductors now bigger conductors you're not going to have any say in the matter they're either going to be stranded or they're going to be compact stranded depending on the size of the conductor hey and while we're talking would you please do me a favor and hit subscribe it helps me out you don't have to 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making a head this is when you gather all of your conductors together and you hook them onto a fish tape or you hook them onto your jetline or your metal tape whatever you're trying to pull with to get these things through the conduit the type of head that you make and the size of it how tight it is how round it is all of that is very important in how easily or how difficult you're going to be able to get conductors through this conduit so as a general rule of thumb i always try to make everything as round as possible because inside of the conduit it's smooth edges and you've got every once in a while you're going to have two pieces of conduit that butt up to each other and there's a coupling that hold them together and sometimes when you you know tighten down too much it can kind of squeeze one of the ends of the conduit so it you have like an edge that something can hit so if you have any flat you know hard edges you can get caught on stuff sometimes when you make uh you know a few different offsets and things like that too you have little kinks that happen in the pipe so just try to make everything as smooth as possible and usually with a round head that just kind of get negates any kind of edges that there might be not always there are still times where things are going to get caught up if you pull with like a jet line or a mule tape or something like that tying a knot and making sure that all your conductors fold down into a nice neat rounded head that's going to go through that conduit will help you so much this becomes a little bit more difficult to do the larger conductors you're working with so right if you got like a bunch of conductors that are the size of my thumb i'm talking like four odd conductors or something like that if you have a whole bunch of them and they're they're all sitting together like this you have to unwrap some of them cut some of the edges off and you're actually making a head with the strands of each one of them and you're kind of making this crazy huge thing that's supposed to go into the conduit and if you have flat edges or you have some pieces of of the the stranding that are like stuck out it's just edges that are going to catch on any couplings that you have or any kind of edges inside that conduit another thing heads can come apart so how you're putting your head together usually we just use electrical tape and you tape up some of the conductors you make a nice loop some people like to tape all the way around the entire head and keep going along the string whatever that's just their preference i personally don't do that i usually just tie up around the conductors that way you leave the end of the head so that it can move freely that way if you do get kind of bound up on something there's a little bit of room for it to wiggle and move it kind of moves like a joint rather than moves like a solid thing again that's just a preference now when you're doing a lot larger wire pulls you're probably gonna be using duct tape you know like a much more rigid tape there are crappy duct tapes out there and there are good tapes like gorilla tape is really really good tape but using that to tape rather than using some cheap crappy tape is going to make sure that all your conductors don't start to come unraveled or break when some of the strands break you know the whole entire thing breaks so just keeping your head together is another really good thing they make something called a sock which is kind of like a chinese finger trap torture whatever those things are called you know where like accordions in you stick your fingers and you try to pull out you can't a sock is very much like that you feed the sock on and when you pull on it it actually stretches out and pulls more tension on the conductors some people use them some people don't but it is one method and i mentioned this briefly but i'm going to talk about it for a second when i pull i don't use my fish tape what sucks about pulling with your fish tape is when you pull with your fish tape it binds up the inside of the fish tape and from the factory a fish tape is rolled up in a pretty neat manner everything is smooth there's no kinks in it but the more kinks that you get in your fish tape the harder it is to roll that thing up and it'll eventually get to the point where it won't roll up anymore because it can't roll up into a smooth circle it's trying to roll up into like egg shapes and squares because everything is so kinked up the another thing don't leave your fish tape sitting out in the back your truck to get rained on they're going to rust even though they're stainless any kind of nicks or anything that you get inside of stainless or any rust that you get on stainless can actually rust the stainless so introducing rust to stainless still takes the stainless nature away from it and will allow it to rust but just take care of your stuff and for me if i buy a brand new fish tape the whole idea is that i'm using that to get through the conduit to bring a fish line back of some sort so either using jetline using mule tape but i'm not pushing fish tape in to hook wires up and pull with this fish tape i don't do that because every time it screws the damn fish tape up and then sometimes you got to cut the fish tape and the end of it you're constantly having to remake new heads if you don't use the fish tape as the thing that pulls through if you hook something to the fish tape and pull a line through use the line to pull more often than not you're not gonna break the line depending again how many bends you put how big a wire uh usually for like you know anything you're pulling in like three quarter or one inch you can use jetline for but if you're up to like two inch three inch you're not gonna want to use jet line you're gonna snap that line so you wanna hook up mule tape to that because that's like thousands of pounds that you can pull with that mule tape but just i recommend you're gonna make your journeyman your master a lot more happy on the field if you don't use their fish tapes to pull with now let's talk about the actual pulling of the conductors through the conduit so really it's always best to have two people at least two people sometimes you're gonna need far more than that depending on how big the pull is um sometimes you're gonna be like running a whole bunch of conductors out that are like you know 200 feet and each one of them is like huge so you need like three people and a mini excavator to help pull you know like it can be kind of a nightmare but it is always easier to do uh any kind of you know pulling through conduit if you're not by yourself if you are by yourself you're gonna have a time trying to figure that whole thing out sometimes you can do it but sometimes you end up uh trying to do something that you shouldn't be doing just so that you can get it done if you know what i mean another tip is always group your conductors together if you're running multiple different circuits that have multiple different neutrals um or you know three-phase circuits that are multi-wire branch circuits or anything like that at both ends when you pull everything out identify your groups with tape some kind of tape mechanisms on one of them you can put one ring of black around them on the other side you can put two rings around but do that on both sets so that you don't get confused so that way once you've pulled everything in you cut it at both ends they're already identified now another tip that i try to do is i try to use less bends and use more boxes so this is something that is just a preference of mine and uh i've had different people that i've worked under that hate this idea or love this idea um and you know each person has their own preference but i think the time that it takes you to make all of these special bends versus just make a couple bends and put boxes up and add more boxes sure you're gonna have to spend a little bit more time making joints right going around to each one of the locations to make joints but you're gonna have a much easier day than you are trying to bend the perfect piece and then [ __ ] it up and messing up your bends and bending the wrong way on one of them and trying to put four bends in one piece of pipe it takes more time and the likelihood of you nailing every single one of your bends unless you've been doing this for a really long time is is pretty like average you know you're gonna waste a lot of time and you're gonna waste a lot of pipe so uh i try to just get in the mood or get in the the attitude of uh getting some extra boxes i'll do my box offsets i'll do some kicks and some you know offsets and things like that but i'm not doing like crazy all these crazy bends unless the job specifically calls for it if i can i'm just going to line up a whole bunch of boxes and then i'm going to have a joint making party at the end of the day and just have my day be easier rather than it be more difficult because now we have all these crazy pulls and all of them are difficult because there's so many bends between them and it's just a difficult thing i would rather have an easier day so i just choose and i think over time it actually does save you time you can do it faster having more boxes and less bends than the time to go down and bend and come back up and see if it works and go back down and bend and just like keep doing that just takes a lot of time another thing i think helps is to think about what side you need to start on when you're doing your pull so before you just like go set up your rack somewhere and assume that you're gonna pull from one direction think about like in your head okay if i put the reel over there and i pull from this side is there anything that's going to impede or be in my way over here or is the reel going to get caught up in a bunch of stuff like look at both sides and imagine your head that you're pulling you know pulling up or pulling down whatever it is and just think what side is the better side to start on now if you have like three boxes that i think the easier thing to do maybe you're like up on a lift or something and you've got one box above you and there's two others that you're feeding to i think the thing that makes the most sense is to put the wire rack on the lift with you and go up and just stay in that one spot and have whoever's pulling be the person that moves because they don't have all this crap to move and go to a different location so just think about stuff like that what's the easiest way to do this and who needs to be where and why also if you're doing something like an underground pole right you're like pulling across like 100 foot parking lot or something like that there's a couple of bends that's going to be an arduous pull especially if you're pulling like 350 mcm like it's probably going to take several people it might take a truck it's rigged up somehow it might take an excavator or a backhoe to like pull on a mule tape and pull up while you've got other people feeding down on the other end so think about like where are we going to pull if i have to get a piece of heavy equipment over here to pull where are all of my people going to be to try to feed and then that will tell you which place do i need to start rolling all these conductors all the way out and start identifying them do we need to do that on this side or are we going to do that on this side are there cars that are going to drive through and keep running over all of our conductors so it's really helpful before you just get out start rolling stuff out like go think about again pulling from both sides and pushing from both sides and whichever one makes the most sense is the one that you should go from something else to think about i don't ever put wire numbers on before i do a pull so a lot of people will try to do this and then you end up pulling all of the wired labels off and then you have to sit and re-identify all of them again so just do that afterwards again i tape up my groups so i know which groups which and then it's really easy for you to sit there with a book of numbers and just go through and identify them all afterwards um and the other thing kind of on that same note is try not to damage the conductors when you're pulling them in um a lot of times people are like pulling and pulling and it's getting caught on one end and it's just ripping the insulation and you don't realize it but you'll actually score like pull a whole section of insulation off and then you've got a short in the middle of the conduit you don't know that until you go to start startup equipment um so when you think that you're damaging conductors you need to stop and be like hey we're kind of messing up the conductors in this pull uh what do we need to do so that we're not doing that like did we use lube that's another thing i would use lube most of the time if it's large conductors in large conduit you're talking like inch and a half and up two inch three inch four inch use lube there's no reason not to you're gonna get messy but most of the time you're doing this stuff outside um if you're doing stuff indoors and you're doing like you know three quarter inch conduit or half inch conduit you have one circuit there's barely any wire you don't have to there's no reason to get that muddy and or you know get all that that stuff all over you just get filthy so think about the environment but you should you should probably use lube for anything that's larger especially stuff that you're trying to run equipment through you know like the the whole rope that you're using and the head lube that thing up and let the the excavator or the people on either side pull the slack through and then lube up all of the conductors for the first few feet let that pull through lube up some more just keep going so that it gets jammed all the way down in the 90 and you're pulling the lube through the conduit with the head um usually i'll take like a whole bottle if i've got like a four inch or there's like four or four inch inside like a tap can or something like that i'll just dump a whole bottle in all four of them and then i'll open up another bottle and then i'll start to feed the head in and i'll start lubing up all of the conductors as we pull them in as well so you're just pulling like a whole bunch of lube through because by the time the conductors get halfway there the lube's not going to really be on there anymore but it at least takes the friction off of this side so that the friction on the other side is the only friction really and the last bit of advice that i have for pulling is if there's already conductors in a run and you're trying to add more conductors to the conduit i would always use a nylon fish tape don't use a metal fish tape nylon fish tape is not going to damage any conductors that are in there even if it kind of gets stuck or gets caught you have to rip it back there's no metal parts to rip the insulation a lot of times with a metal fish tape people have manufactured or engineered their own heads and they're all sharp and jagged so when you come to pull the new wires in you end up just ripping through a whole bunch of the conductors in there and you end up with shorts or all you end up catching on to the existing conductors that are in there and you're pulling them with you so just there's all kinds of problems that it causes so i use a nylon fish tape that doesn't have a hooked head it just has a plastic end with a hole in it that way the conductors that you are pulling in are only pulling the loop side towards you so there's nothing to really get caught on plus you don't have any metal jagged edges that you're pulling [Music] now if you guys are wondering what brand i've been using obviously you see team orange everywhere thank you so much to klein for sending these for me to test out um i love these benders so um they make them in multiple different sizes you can get a half inch three quarter one inch inch and a quarter you don't really want to do anything beyond that by hand because it's going to be damn near impossible so but i love having these they actually come with little uh little markings so it lets you know what your angles are for your bends your depth inches all of that different stuff so it actually helps you bend the conduit um and then these if you notice there's a few different ones that i had throughout the episode um you know we got the nylon um i have two different lengths of steel fish tape so i keep one that's a little bit shorter something i can kind of trash a little bit to the more expensive nice one i try to keep really really nice that's a 240 foot this is 125 foot so thank you again klein i really appreciate it that's all i got so in conclusion basically use people when you can use people to pull it's going to be so much easier sometimes you will need eight people like yes i've done uh 600 mcm and you have parallel runs of it and you're in a three-phase environment and you've got a huge tractor on one side that's pulling up and you've got like four people or more just trying to get everything so that it's straight and then you've got two guys like one is kind of feeding and pushing down the other one's feeding up and trying to feed a loop because that's the thing too is you always when you're pulling conductors the side that is pulling is going to have a much more difficult time if there's no slack being generated on the other side so if you can generate slack by getting all of the conductors kind of in an arc so that there's a slack that can pull down it's going to be much easier for the puller rather than having just taught you know tight wire that they're trying to pull so always always always keep slack that's the benefit of having another person right if you have a second person they can kind of keep they can manage the reel manage the conductors and keep a nice loop of slack for you so all you're doing is just pulling slack you're not pulling tension sometimes you're going to need a truck or a excavator or backhoe that's just the way it is on these bigger poles all of you construction guys probably know that already um when you're doing really big underground pulls that's where the big separator is from doing undergrounds where it kills you versus doing them wise and this is where up sizing your conduit really goes a long distance so that you're not you're not killing yourself trying to pull really big wires through really small conduit and the last thing to mention is when you're designing your conduit runs when you're actually putting conduit whether it's underground whether it's overhead you're doing all kinds of conduit you're doing just a couple pieces like doesn't matter always always always imagine yourself pulling when you're designing it in your head before you even strap the first piece up there it's going to go a long way but if you can beat the job with your head you don't have to beat it with your body and that will save you through the years of you doing this just spend time sitting there looking and being like all right if i put all of this up like this and like this and like this what is that going to look like when we have to go to pull it what side am i going to come from oh that's going to suck so no i'm not going to run it like that i'm going to do this instead it goes a long way just taking a little bit of time to do that so thank you guys so much for watching let me know if you have any other questions there's probably 400 more tips that i could give you on pulling conduit but i got to wrap this thing up thank you so much for watching please make sure you join subscribe hit the notification bell hit the thumbs up i love you crazy people and i will see you in the next [Music] episode [Music] this can't music and video you

Channel: Electrician U

Views: 735,160

Keywords: electrician, electrical, electricity, dustin stelzer, electrician vlog, construction, commercial, residential, electrical vlog, electrical courses, electrician courses, electrical class, electrician class, electrician school, klein tools, pulling wire, wire, emt, fish tape, conduit, pipe bending, conduit bending, pulling wire through conduit, pulling wire through pvc conduit, using a fish tape, fishing wires, electricians, pulling wire through underground conduit, pulling wires

Id: H_iDuhnXZzU

Length: 28min 7sec (1687 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 11 2021