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Hi, this is George with Argo electrical and I am the surge protector guy. So, this is podcast number 22. This is a deeper dive or further explanation of the Shoreline Management requirements by the Corps of Engineers at like Sidney Lanier. Like Lanier’s starts around dawesville flows all the way down to coming, Buford and a huge part of it is in the Gainesville, area Forsyth and Hall County, especially mostly for side haul and Dawson County, are they the counties that are affected? So anyway, our last podcast we talked, we just read through the Exhibit C document that they provide you at the time of inspection. If you have one of these docks on your property that adjoins the lake, you’ll have to have this dock inspection done by a licensed electrician every five years, it doesn’t mean that you can’t do the work you just need to find someone like me that has a license that can sign off on them. Now let’s talk about the underground wiring. I think it’s a little screwy the way they’ve got it laid out. It says installation from property line and shoreline service pole says must be under underground follow access path, no overhead wiring. Only tops you f and USB cable may be used. And of course if you put your wire in conduit, this would not be applicable. So insulation requirements cables, or conduit and it doesn’t include conduit need to be at least 24 inches deep. If you were in conduit and National Electrical Code says 18 inches 24 inches is only six inches vapor and keep anybody out of it. Okay, and Lancey talks about the warning tape must be buried around 12 inches deep, so that you can buy a big roll of this yellow warning tape. And it actually has warning printed on it about 5000 times for the 1000 foot row. But um, you can, you know, start that off at the beginning of your ditch, as you’re filling back in, put the wire and put 812 inches worth of guard on top of the wire, I would pack it down just a little bit. And then you can lay your type right in on top of it and then come back and drag the rest of the the dart back into your ditch. Okay, service Paul says can’t be below elevation 1073 MSL I’m sure that’s close to sea level, you know, in this area. I know we’re never gonna have to see your eyes that far. But anyway, they won’t it. Generally if you go if you go on like linear, and you see people that have dogs. The Gangplank is going to be down on a lower level and then you come up for five feet. And you’ll see you know, it was what they call the shoreline. All right, and the water might be 1520 foot from that shoreline, just depending on how full the lake is, but I won’t it up on that hill to where you know, the legs gonna have to come up 2530 foot for it to get to the access point of the power at your service pole. Okay, and they won’t nothing any larger than a six inch pole. We generally get a four by four treated piece of lumber square treated piece of lumber, says eight foot maximum above the ground, you can buy the eight foot or and make this guy about six foot high. We’d like to buy the 10 foot or and we can put two or three foot in the ground we can put you a what we call a yard blast or light, which is you know now is an LED light with a photo sale, you can just leave the switch on and then we get start the light have come home. Very nice. They have a 20 year warranty. It’s about $150 for that light. And of course the last time they got listed is they want you to use a wooden post. I don’t want any metal down there. Like Lanier sits on the largest piece of granite in the Western Hemisphere. Okay, and up and down that lake all the time when these lightning storms run through, you know from the spring all the way through the fall. It’s retracted their water it’s granted both of them, you know, transfer their conductive so they you know had the potential to transfer electricity. All right At your Shoreline panel box says it must be at eye level, you know a good, a good height is around 60 to 65 inches. You can’t go wrong with that. Course it always depends on who your ranger is. They’re the ones the Corps Rangers are the ones that will let you know if you have something that doesn’t meet their standard, okay? It says the cable leading from the ground must be enclosed in a conduit and hardwired. So what that means is the cable coming up out of the dirt can’t be just flopping on the pole, you got to put it in a conduit. A good rule of thumb is a one inch to an inch and a half size conduit just makes it a lot easier to pull that wire up. You know when we do them on the side of houses or whatever the power company requires us to put a nanny. One thing about putting that elbow on the bottom of your PVC conduit going into the dirt, it’s a lot less chance that your wires going to get pinched. If it gets pinched over time eventually, that’s probably the place that’s gonna burn out. Make it easy enough for repair but your wires gonna be short. Okay, so service from the shoreline panel box to the boat dock. The cable from the panel box must be hardwired into ground fault circuitry. So what you own is you want to tie your circuit coming out of your sub panel on your four by four post into a 20 amp ground fault circuit interrupter breaker. That’s a GFCI. Breaker. Okay, you need 20 amps
so, what you’re doing is you will come out of your sub panel on the four by four posts and a piece of conduit flexible conduit is acceptable. So I’m gonna choose water tide it has to be NEMA three rated, okay, nema three just simply means that it’s waterproof. You can go higher NEMA four name or five. That’s really more of industrial applications that are you know, flexible conduit and fittings that are used around chemicals. Okay, you don’t really need to go that far. NEMA three is fine. All right, only approved for wet locations. That means it’s a you know, outdoor wet location box. I say if you go into Home Depot and ask for NEMA three, most of the people in there look at you like you’re crazy. You want to look for the term wait location, outdoor rated, locking and grounding receptacles. So when you know when I was talking about coming back out of your your sub panel on your four by four post at the shoreline, you’ll come out of that with a conduit you’ll have a waterproof box, they do make PVC boxes that you can just slide the pipe right into there, seal it up with with glue and it’s considered to be NEMA three watertight, wet location approved parsley, I like to cast boxes, they’re partially metal, you can screw your fittings into that they work real well the problem with plastic is once you if you ever strip out the screws spots to where you’re putting your cover on or whatever, you will not be able to get a new screw in there. And then you’ll you know be faced you know with trying to re tap the hole or just taking the box completely off and replacing it just to replace a busted cover. Okay, but um the receptacles there at that post is a single receptacle. It’ll be a three hole receptacle. That’s a twist lock. That’s outdoor that makes it outdoor rated with an N US cover. Maximum number of receptacles Oh, excuse me, excuse me, surplus cable. For years during the low like elevations if you look at the drawing on your Exhibit C which is a two page document, they’re going to show you 75 to 100 foot of cable. Usually what we do is we’ll purchase 75 foot of the so called or asked J cord and you run it you run out of the receptacle at the shoreline post. And then you have to have a junction box mounted on your stride or some kind of steel on the end of the gang plank. It’s up about two and a half, three foot, middle of the thighs a great measuring point for most people. Unless of course you’re really short 510 So, you know, top of the thighs what I use, right and anyway on their you know what they call a wire keep or something like that it’s got a Chinese finger on this on the bottom of a weather proof fitting connector, you know, you can screw bust your hole in the bottom of your box with a unit bed or something to fit the size connector. If you’re running 12 to the ground, it should be a half inch connector, that Chinese finger will keep someone like a kid or someone that’s rolling the dock in and out maybe just wasn’t paying attention or whatever. If that thing’s not in there, it’ll snatch the wire, and when you’re rolling the dock in and out and then your connections will be no good. And you’ll have to pay somebody like me to come out there and fix the connections or figure it out and fix it yourself. Okay. All right, and um, back to the surplus cable or whatever if the legs really up, maybe you’re only using 20 foot of cable we get. We like to get like a hose holder or whatever. You can get a metal one that’s got two holes on on a bracket beside it. You screw that into your post and you can roll up your excess wire right there. On the shore. It’s very manageable, and then when the light goes out, you get ready to let your dog out. You can unroll it right there, going towards the lake and let the dock out and pulled the wire right on out with the dock so receptacles on the dock, all receptacles must have ground fault protection at service pole. That means, you know, in the old days they would put a GFI on the pole. Instead of buying the breaker you really want to break her to protect the entire circuit. You do not want your aluminum dock to get energized, or the steel on your dock begin to energize. They must be in weatherproof receptacle boxes with self closing caps. That’s an EN US cover that I was talking about. So they’re saying a maximum number of receptacles on the dock is two single or one duplex receptacle. The single receptacles look like the old ones that we used to use for a window unit and an air conditioner and whatever. You can find them at Home Depot, Lowe’s, whatever or your local parts store I buy most of my parts from city plumbing and electric and coming Georgia. I also have a store in Gainesville Blue Ridge, Cleveland Winder I know they’ve got like six or seven locations, but they’ll treat you right tell them George Argos thank you that may or may not get you a discount. All right, so your convenience outlets 15 and 20 amp rated I would use 20 amp stuff, the difference in the 20 amp is you will not be able to plug them into the back of the receptacle. But if you wrap that wire around your screw, bend it down, tighten it down and have the wire going in the right direction. The chance of that wire ever coming out from under that screw is very very slim. Okay. At the post, they want these receptacles to be around four foot over the ground 48 inches on the boat dock itself they won’t at least 30 inches above the deck like say middle of the thighs a pretty good reference point if you don’t have a tape measure handy Alright, dock wiring must be approved for wet locations and enclosed in conduit. Now we talked about you know the underground section using us for USF wire right and also made the point that if you ran conduit all the way down there, you could use t h h n because as long as it’s in you know an approved waterproof conduit that is acceptable wiring on the dock you can you know when we wire these docks, we won’t run PVC all the way around to the receptacles to the lights whatever the customer wants. You have to have flexible conduit going across the ramp from the ramp to the main section of the dock that way when the dog beings or whatever the conduit doesn’t break, okay and they will call you on that. Another thing is when you put this liquid con liquid tight conduit together, make sure your joints are good and your connectors are good. Okay. So anyway, moving right along. Enough conduit must be installed to prevent entry of moisture. That means all openings are prohibited. You need to cap it off or whatever. If you use the A few years the PVC boxes you can find caps where you bought the box, which is just a plug into the open end it’s not being used. I like to use what the people at the part store called a bale box. It’s a weatherproof outdoor box. It’s metal clad. Kind of a composite deal, but it’s a little bit harder. It’s not fiberglass, it’s actually metal. And the entryways you combined with three entries, five entries, you can buy them anywhere from two, three quarters, half inch, or an even goes up to a one inch size. One inch is a little bit of overkill, if you’re new at this or whatever. And um, you’re really wanting to do it yourself. Maybe you’re so ambitious, that You even bought a fish tape, which what electricians used to pull wire through conduit, I highly suggest upgrading the size of the pipe three quarter, you know, make the wire flow a lot easier, you’ll be able to pull it easier, and you’ll be able to fish that fish tape through your conduit much better. Half inch can be tough if you don’t know what you’re doing. I’ve been doing this for almost 40 years now. And it still gives me a fit from time to time. Okay. So, lighting minimum requires for Safe Access will be allowed maximum ball size of any for any purpose, floodlights or whatever on the dog is 150 Watt. The good news is you can buy
led replacements for the old, you know, the old light bulbs. The name is escaping me right this minute, but you can buy a 20 watt light bulb, it’ll put out the same light as the old fashioned incandescent bulbs that put out 150 Watts, and it’s probably going to only use about 20 watts of energy fixtures and lights must be approved for the wet locations and mounted to the exterior not beyond the outer perimeter of the boat dock. I mean you can’t put it out over the water. And the old days up here the guys would. And girls I’m sure would use a floating light they plugged the floating light in, put it out over the you know the water at nighttime and it would attract the shiners up to the light. Then the crappie would come up and buy it made for easy pickings. I’ve actually used that myself. But in any event, your permanent fixtures on the dock cannot extend past the bottom of the boat dock. They must be aimed downward so nobody comes around the curb at night and they’re getting shine in the eyes with lights off your dog likes a crash boat. And the lighting along the path, maybe mushroom tight with no exposed wiring. You need to put that in a conduit coming up out of the dirt and something to hold the conduit or they make some posts are about 7580 bucks apiece. But they work real nice. It’s a square composite post. There’s even a space in there to where you can add a receptacle wherever you want it. So you would have a convenience outlet coming down the path towards shoreline. The mushroom type they’re talking about if you want to find these yourself and that post I was referring to has a half inch threaded hole on the top you can either cap it off the the post comes with a cap short nipple that’s closed and or you could screw that out and use what they call up a go to light which yes does look like a mushroom. You should be able to buy these lights and either white or really forest dark green. And I think you can actually also buy a Polish brown dark brown. All right. So general guidelines, all breakers cables, cords and receptacles must be assigned size to accommodate service needs. It’s recommended that a licensed electrician performed these installations. Alright. And what’s going to happen is if you do it yourself, and then it doesn’t match up to what this drawing is and what this documentation says your electrician may not sign off on your paperwork. And in any regards, you know the whole point of this is one Kalach you know we do this type of work, but to is to help you remove any liability for yourself in case somebody suffers. being shocked on your property your dock and liability is blamed on you the homeowner, the property owner Once again, my name is George. I’m going to Argo electrical. You can talk contact me at 770-596-1437 or you can find me online at Argo electrical electrical.com. We’re on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, all that fun stuff. Have a great day. Thanks for listening
