Electrical – Partially finished basement conduit

electrical

Took down the drop ceiling to paint it black and am installing new recessed lighting and cleaning up/ fixing the terrible wiring job i discovered after removing the ceiling. My question, along some of the painted cinder block walls there will be outlets, can my conduit stop once at the ceiling or should i just run all junction boxes/lights/outlets in conduit ?enter image description hereenter image description here

Best Answer

The service panel

First, that tiny 16-space panel is already super-full, and way to small for any civilized sort of house. As you refinish that basement, provision space for either

  • Fitting a subpanel directly beneath it (or anywhere else in the house that is convenient). I recommend a 30-space/30-60 "circuit" so you finish with 44 spaces (30+16-2). A main-lug subpanel is fine.
  • Replacing the main panel with a 40-space, however this is intrusive and/or expensive.

The 30-40 space new panel will certainly have a higher amp bus rating than your current service; that is desirable, it's like fitting VR tires (130mph) on your car instead of R tires (85 mph) even though you don't exceed 85. If you replace the main panel the new main breaker will surely be 225A, change it to whatever size the electric company tells you to.

I boggle at what is going on with the wood framing around the panel. It looks like the framing is proud of the panel and giving it side clearance, with cables running along the sides of the panel. That's fine, but more room should be given so you aren't bunching >4 cables together, and so you can practically use the plentiful side knockouts on the panel.

Conduit vs. wire guard

There are two ways to use conduit:

  • as a random piece of metal to guard/protect wires run in a cable wiring method, this involves monkey-wrestling balky cable down the pipe.
  • as the conduit wiring method, wherein you are entitled to use individual wires (and even stranded wire, which is wonderful to work with, though tricky to terminate at a non-screw-to-clamp outlet or switch)

You can transition between the cable wiring method and conduit wiring method at any junction box. That's important because given the framing around that service panel, it may be challenging to get conduit all the way to it.

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