Today I can’t recall all of the manufactured homes I’ve worked on.  Nor can I remember the dates of when I hooked them up.  For awhile I was able to do both, but when the number passed 200 I could no longer remember them all.  I do remember that on at least three occasions, working under the home got me seriously wet.  And it wasn’t warm weather.

On two of the occasions I had to lie in a pool of water while I worked.  In the third instance it was raining very hard.  Every time I crawled out or under the home, the rain coming down the side of the house was like a full shower.

However, worse than any of those was the time I was working underneath a home and had to cut into the belly wrap under the home.  I needed to run a wire from one part of the home to another.  To do so, I had to open the belly wrap, feed the wire through the underside of the home and then into an electrical box.

I opened up the belly wrap and about 1 – 1-1/2 gallons of liquid poured out of the belly and over my face and head.  Well, I was already underneath.  I might as well finish my work.  It probably isn’t going to get any worse.

I completed my work and crawled out and went inside.  I checked about where in the trailer the liquid might have come from.  It just happened that the area where I had been working was directly beneath the bathroom toilet.

I hadn’t noted that the liquid had a particular odor, but I immediately went home and cleaned up and changed clothing before I went back to work.  I didn’t get sick, so I figured the water had come from a different source.

Sometimes the underside of a mobile home would be plastered with mud from being transported in wet weather.

In my opinion, the most difficult manufactured home I ever hooked up was a double wide that was set on top of a full open basement.  We had to run the conduit underground, through the cement wall of the basement.  The job involved some basement wiring and then routed back to the manufactured home.  Putting the wire into the home involved “fishing” the wire up into the panel.  With the amount of labor involved it became very expensive.

There have been times when I have hooked up the electrical feeder for manufactured homes that were set on solid rock.  The solid rock makes it problematic when it comes to grounding them.  There has to be two ground rods driven, no closer than 6 feet from each other, and grounded by wire into the metered electrical box.

In one case the grounding parameters required me to run 150 feet of copper wire to a well casing to get ground.  In another case the only ground to drive a ground rod into was an earth fill portion of the project – 60 feet away.  So I drove the ground rods and then ran the ground wire the 60 feet to the ground rods.

Another time I drove a ground rod nearly horizontal along a basalt rock plain.  Still another time I inserted the ground rods into a fresh pour of concrete.  Today that is referred to as a “Ufer ground”, and it is now accepted as the superior way of grounding.