Very few electricians I have known would dig a ditch.  However, working alone, I had no choice but to do my own ditch digging.  My wife refused!

Here again you never know what kind of soil or what kinds of objects you might run into.  Sometimes I would arrange to hire someone to come dig the ditch.  Not always could you arrange for someone to come immediately.

On one job it was going to cost $100.00 to hire a man to set up his machine and he was busy at the time.  I told him to forget it.  I grabbed my shovel and started to dig.  It turned out that this time and place it was perfect digging!

No rocks, no roots, the soil was just moist enough, the dirt did not stick to the shovel, and yet it was easy to drive the point of the shovel into the earth.  A fifty foot ditch took me one hour without stopping to rest.  Very rarely have I been able to earn $100.00 in an hour.

Not all ditch digging is like that.  Near Creston, Washington, one ditch about 2 feet long was through broken lava.  I piled the broken lava in one pile, and the sand and soil in another pile.  Since I was using conduit, I threw the broken lava in first.  What a mistake!  I could not get all of it back in the ditch.  It left a ridge in the lawn.

The hardest ditch to dig was right alongside a mobile home and about 1 foot long.  There was no room for the shovel handle.  Eventually I learned to carry a short garden spade in my truck.

I remember another time the home owner offered to dig the ditch.  Usually when someone digs their own ditch, it is about 18 inches deep (too shallow) and crooked, as they wind their way over and around exposed rocks.  I would have to complete the ditch when I got to the job.

I agreed to let the home owner try.  When I got there he had dug a ditch 2 feet deep, 3 feet wide, perfectly squared and clean.  It was ready for me to use 3” conduit in the ditch.

Nice.

In fact, Artful!

All electrical wiring must provide a return path to the earth for the electrical current.  This is referred to as “grounding.”  The purpose of grounding, or the return path to earth, is to prevent flesh and bone from inadvertently providing that path.  (an uncomfortable and frequently fatal instance)  Until recently the most common way to provide that return path to the earth was the installation and use of ground rods.

Some jobs, where heavy metal beams were installed upright in concrete, allowed you to use the upright metal beams as a grounding means.  There are a few other options to the ground rod available, and of late the NEC encourages using a metal rod encased in a concrete foundation as a path to the earth.

A typical ground rod is 5/8” diameter and 8 feet long.  Knowing what is beneath the surface of the earth 8 feet down is not easy.  Usually you have no real idea.  The earth can be completely free of rocks, or it could be filled with small rocks, large rocks, boulders or other unknown objects installed and then forgotten.  Sometimes ground that is completely free of rocks can be compacted so much that it is as unforgiving as concrete.  In other cases, ground that is filled with rocks has been recently disturbed and provides an easy ground rod driving experience.

There are locations and situations where you are permitted to lay-in a ground rod in a ditch and bend one end of the rod up towards the surface.  There have been times when the ground was so rocky I have had to do that.  One time I was driving a ground rod, successfully, until it was about 7 feet in the ground.  Then I hit substantial subsurface basalt.  It would not allow the ground rod to go any further.  Since that time I have made it a practice to drive a ground rod at a 45 degree angle.

One location in the Spokane area, on a mountain side, had numerous ground rods sticking out of the ground all over the property.  They were all exposed about 5 feet out of the ground.  I guess they had a difficult time getting 8 feet of ground rod driven.

There have been a few times that I have tried to “save” an unused/unneeded ground rod by pulling it out of the ground.  One time I had a guy on a back-hoe pull one out for me.  When it came out it looked like a wet noodle.  It must have gone around 4 large rocks as it went down.  Since you can’t drive a bent ground rod, it would have been just as useful to abandon that one.

There was one instance where, to provide grounding, I had to run 50 feet of copper wire to a steel well casing.  The well casing had been in the ground for many years.  When I tested it I found that the grounding efficiency would not allow me to run a 100 watt bulb using the well casing as a ground.  However in that particular case I was grounding a transformer that used less than 100 watts, so I let it go.

When I first started driving ground rods, by hand, I used a sledge hammer.  Then I decided it was easier to use a steel fence post pounder.  Either way can be dangerous to the operator’s health.  One time when pounding a ground rod, one of the guys took such a big swing that the fence post pounder over balanced on the upward swing and came down on his head.  Another time the pounder came off the top of the ground rod, went a little to the side and on the downswing the guy’s hand got caught between the post and the pounder.  It ripped up his knuckles pretty good.

Lately we have made good use of powered impact drivers to drive ground rods.

We like that better.

O.K.  So that title could mean a lot of things.  When doing electrical work, one of the problems you frequently encounter is that of not knowing what is on the other end of the drill bit.  In my time I have bored holes through electrical wiring, sheet metal, ducting, water pipe, gas lines, and sewer lines.  (The last two instances were not aromatically pleasing.)

On one job I was drilling a hole through the floor of a mobile home and went through the top and bottom of a heat duct.  Electricians are not allowed to run wire through a duct, not to speak of doing so through an opening with sharp edges.

Certain places do not allow going through concrete.  In one instance I was drilling under a raised floor in the Davenport Hotel.  I was using a flat spade bit.  I pushed and pushed but it wouldn’t go through.  I noticed little copper shavings coming out of the hole.  I got my flashlight and peered into the hole.  There was a copper pipe with a pin sized hole where the tip of the drill bit had penetrated.  Around that pin hole the pipe was shiny where the spade bit had been chewing on it.

I checked to see where the pipe was going and to see if it was in use.  (No, I did not test for escaping gases using a match or lighter.)  We could not locate any information about the piping.  Nothing was escaping from the small hole, so we abandoned the pipe and relocated the drilling location.

One time I penetrated a PVC pipe while drilling.  In that instance I was able to reach the hole with some duct seal and close it up.

Another time we were working on a home that had been constructed by putting several cabins together.  We could not get through from one of the rooms to the room on the other side of the wall.  Upon further investigation we found a 10” gap between the rooms, caused by putting the different buildings together.  Of course it required a much longer drill bit to get through both walls.

Distance drilling also requires that the drill be perfectly perpendicular throughout the drilling process.  This is evident in situations with a large gap, or a thick beam.  If you don’t hold the drill precisely, the bit will exit in the wrong place and, probably, in a place that isn’t conducive to a good looking final trim.