Cherrie 274 wrote:
I must have missed it but why above ground not underground?
That's a good question. The electric company will run up to 130' feet of wire (aboveground) for free, so that's why I had it ran aboveground to the meter pole. The power will be ran underground from the meter pole to the well house and beyond (home, garage/shop, barn, etc.). My electrician knows how anal I am, so he suggested installing the meter pole at 100' feet instead of 130' to help alleviate some of the wire weight. Due to the weight, the meter pole would eventually start to lean with the additional 30' feet of wire. Even with 100 feet of wire, he installed the pole leaning slightly in the opposite direction of the wire. Sure enough, I could see a 1/4" gap in the soil where the pole had been pulled back in. The pole now looks straight.
Cherrie 274 wrote:
underground is more costly but isn't it less likely to be damaged?
In my situation, it's actually more cost effective to go underground than above ground. Depending on the spacing of the poles, the estimated cost was $1,500 per pole and it would take 5 poles to get to the building site. We decided to go underground with the power mainly for cosmetic reasons, but there are also some cost benefits. I'm also able to help with some of the labor costs.
At 7,000 feet, we get a lot of lightening strikes. That's one reason why we have two grounding rods on our meter pole (which is code). It's not uncommon for the power to go down several times each year, but those are mainly due to a failure in the grid itself. The electrical company does a pretty good job keeping the trees cut/trimmed so that fallen tress are less likely to take a wire/pole with them. The best solution is to have a backup system so that grid failures are no longer a problem. "Going off the grid" (as the thread title indicates) is our ultimate goal.