Barn Wiring and Lighting Advice

[jacksmom]

wow folks - GREAT stuff.

where we are there are no inspections required for agricultural building wiring. scary but true.

we have a copy of the current code book and jacksdad has taken several courses on residential wiring at the local community college (he was considering becoming licensed).
we’ve already corrected some very dangerous wiring schemes in our little house that was installed by ‘professionals’. i think we have a leg-up on the average do-it-yourselfer.

farmdad - please contribute - we are trying to do as much of this ourselves as possible.

tcgelec - thank you for the great info! i’m printing everything out and passing it to jacksdad. you might find it interesting that the instructor for jacksdad’s last class was a female master electrician, and a damn good one at that

[HFSH]

Okay don’t quote me on this - if I remember, we dropped a 300 amp service to the garage and peeled off 200 to the new barn. We’re mainly using 14 to wire the barn. Lots of GFI outlets.

We’re following the latest and greatest code book.

[SaddleFitterVA]

Tom,

Thanks for going to the trouble of writing that up. I’ll be printing this out.

The first modular section of my barn came today. The next one should come tomorrow…then the materials to finish it on Thursday.

I have my water in their, but will need to run power. I’ll be having my electrician do the panel and get me up for my service inspection, but from there, we will likely be doing it on weekends, the old DIY method.

Mel

[Tom_King]

I have a lot to add but not enough time right now. We have a house full of company–one of the benefits/problems with living at the lake on a holiday weekend.

My information would mostly be for the do-it- yourselfer. If any are so inclined please say so or I won’t bother. No bother if anyone needs the how-to information.

[tcgelec]

The wire you will pull in the conduit is called THHN. There are others approved for use but this is the most common.

You can use EMT (electrical metallic tubing) for a very nice, durable, professional, and in my opinion, safe installation. I used to do it myself before the code change some years ago. It’s just that, being an NEC violation, it won’t pass inspection, around here, anyway. In my area, electrical inspections are not done by building inspectors. They are done by a completely seperate entity, which is certified by the local municipal governments to do electrical inspections on their behalf. We use an entity called the New York Board of Fire Underwriters, which was created by a consortium of fire insurance companies around the year 1900. The inspectors for this agency are specialists in the National Electrical Code, and as such are fairly strict in their interpretations, and are kept up-to-date on changes. After a successful final inspection, we are issued an Underwriter’s Certificate, which we give to the owner, who presents it to the local building department after all other building inspections have been done, in order to get a Certificate of Occupancy (or Certificate of Use) for the barn, after which it is legal to be occupied and used.

We are in the NY Metro area (Long Island) and building/electrical/plumbing codes tend to be rigidly enforced, to the letter of the law, so we do our installations to comply with that. We also don’t usually get paid until we produce an Underwriter’s Certificate, and I have horsey mouths to feed!

Incidentally, in show barns we sometimes put in supplemental fixtures in the stalls with 200 watt bulbs on a timer to “fool” the horses body into not growing a winter coat. These are also used by some to stimulate the estrus cycle in breeding barns.

[armandh]

I stand corrected. this must be new since ours was built, but PVC conduit is easier anyway just cut/glue. but it is more easily subject to damage than heavy wall steel [other than corrosion] as I look at our barn I note that everything that is below 6’ high is PVC. above done in thin-wall steel conduit except drops to lights in BX. no corrosion yet. too true it is the local inspector that decides. also the differences between residential and commercial may come in to play.

[SaddleFitterVA]

tcgelec,

Thank you! THHN, THOSE were the letters I needed.

Mel

[Evalee_Hunter]

We are (I think) going to close on a farm Aug. 3 or thereabouts & we are building a new barn immediately so I am interested in anything anyone has to say about wiring.

We have hired an electrician - many, many years experience, worked for Delaware Park (racetrack) for years wiring their barns, now works for a contractor doing commercial wiring. Our barn will be a side job for him. However, I always try to know about things and keep an eye on things, even when I am not actually doing it.

[MistyBlue]

We just finsihed ahving ours installed by electricians.They finsihed the wiring today, as a matter of fact. Everything is the highest quality and safety, conduit everywhere (hidden and not, GFCI, trippers, breakers, grounded, etc) and the bar has it;'s own supply right from the street with it;'s own transformer. Not sure about where you live, but here in CT we have to have a licensed electrician doing any electrical work if we’re going to pass building inspection. By law. It was worth it…the work is fabulous.

[OlmosHeaven]

If we were doing our barn over again, I would make several changes regarding lights and electricity.

1. I would put a light over every stall with a separate switch. (It’s just a 6-stall barn, so the expense shouldn’t be that much.) Not having light in a stall when I need it is a pain in the neck, even if it’s just to clean a stall that was just used.

2. A double row of lights in the aisle and at the grooming stall. The single row of lights just isn’t sufficient, although if I had lights over each stall, the double row on the aisle might be overkill. But the double row at the grooming stall would be much better illumination of what I’m grooming.
   An option would be three rows of lights, one over each row of stalls and the third down the barn aisle, each with a separate switch.

3. Since we live in South-Central Texas, our barn is wide open and the humidity plays havoc with fluorescent lights. Therefore I would not use fluorescent lights again.

4. I would not let the barn builder put the electricity box in the middle of the wall where the tackroom door is, rendering the remainder of that wall useless. (It’s just one of those little annoyances that I think of whenever I grouse about not having enough hanging storage space.)

5. Mr. OH decided after the fact to add electrical heating tape to our automatic waterers (after we had freezes that necessitated turning off water and draining pipes). Hindsight being 20/20, I would have those wired in also. (Of course, I don’t know that it’s been a problem since then due to where we live – see #3.)

6. I sure wish I had a ceiling fan over the grooming stall and I wish I had a small air conditioner/heater in the tack room to maintain a more hospitable environment for tack. (After 10 inches of rain last month, I’ve been scrubbing mildew off everything.)

Well, I could go on, but I think that’s about it for the electricity.

[Tom_King]

If you are breeding horses put an additional lighting circuit in your foaling stalls and use the blue 25 watt “party” bulbs available in Walmart. They give enough light to see how to work by without bothering the mares. They also work better for video systems than the built in Infared sources.

3-way the barn lights to the house. If you use a video system also 3-way the blue light circuit.

When trenching from the house to the barn for anything add in the trench a 1 1/2 inch black polyethylene pipe that you can pull wires through that you forgot.

[Janet]

You might want to search for postings from tgcelec- or email or PT her. She is a master electrician.

[TedShel]

You have to remember that rodents like barns, so doing the cable or conduit thing will make it so the mices can’t chew on the tasty wires.

[jacksmom]

oh FARMDAD…

[Kestrel]

So is using metal (very heavy) conduit a bad thing? Is it only because of corrosion or is possible conduction a problem?

[cweimer]

<BLOCKQUOTE class=“ip-ubbcode-quote”><font size="-1">quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by HFSH:
We’re following the latest and greatest code book. <HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

Which brings me to a question we’ve been struggling with through house repair and barn building . . . where do you get the dang codebook? All we hear from the inspector’s office is that 1) it has to meet code and 2) they can’t tell us what code is . . .

[armandh]

going all out [edit metal conduit not to code]
heavy wall [threaded] conduit for all exposed areas,
regular conduit for non exposed. [current code requires pvc conduit]
ground fault outlets
arc interrupt breakers.
run a green [earth ground] wire in all conduit.
[how many times have you seen disjointed conduit?]

[CB_TB]

The farm I used to board at used to shut off power to the barns at night after the last “bed check”, about 1 am. The owners lived thre, so things were never unsupervised. This was an old dairy farm with the cow barns converted to box stalls. The best care in the world and home grown hay. Now that my girls are home, I too, shut power off except to turn lightson if I feed after dark, or am working /cleaning up and need power for something.Great ideas for electrical installations, though. Anything we can do to make our stabling safer is well worth the time , effort and money.

[DBick211]

I just built out barn and doing the same thing. It’s a big barn and for future add ons, I’ll be ready. Pu in a 200 amp service and about to do the wiring… Doing it myself because of outragious bids. I thought I was going to do MC cable so criters can’t chew and such. What did you find out and deside to do? I see the long electricians version. Thanks My barn build time lapse that I did

[SaddleFitterVA]

Welcome. 20 years later.

What I did for my barn. I upgraded the florescents to LEDs about 7 years ago. It was becoming difficult to find bulbs and some of them had failing ballasts.

PVC Conduit, or in places where I wanted more bend, that flexitube conduit stuff, that has a name I have long since forgotten.
Lights on both sides of aisle (3 48" lights on each side of a 48’ aisle)
Lights over the divider between stalls. (5 48" lights over each divider)
North/South side switches on lights.
Ran 10/2 wire in the ditch to all water hydrants, have outlets at each.
Have electrical outlets at 4’ level, for clippers/heated water buckets/phone chargers. Have outlets above lights in aisle for stall fans, those are switched, not per stall, but per side.
I added a light at the end of the aisle at the top as we had shadows behind when grooming in winter.
The electrician I used did something wrong on one side and one outlet was using the wrong wire and tripped the GFCI every time a load was placed on it, we finally got that fixed with many hours of cursing and testing wires.

It’s been almost 20 years and I don’t regret not having a light switch on every stall, nor a switch for every fan. I only have 6 stalls, and if I have a vacant stall, it’s easy enough to unplug that fan if I really want to.