Electrical Progress

Work in the basement is coming along slowly. With fishing on weekends and softball/class on weekdays, I've only been able to get a couple of hours in each week. Most of the work has been for the electrical in the basement. I've installed over 50 outlets, 10 switches, and 1000+ feet of 20awg wire.

I managed to get the bathroom vent installed. Here is the picture of the light/fan and the insulated ductwork heading into the storage area where it then goes under the beams and up to the hole through the outside wall. The hole in the outside wall took 4 days to drill. I used a 4" hole saw and my battery operated drill would only last for about 2 mins of heavy drilling before dying. The outside wall was 3" thick engineered plywood and there was one engineered joist I had to go through as well. It made me nervous cutting that large of a hole in the side of the house, but it had to be done!




Here is the vent I put on the outside of the house. This is with the fan off. You can see that it closes itself to stop water from getting in and AC/Heat from getting out.




Once the fan turns on, the vents open nicely. This vent wasn't absolutely necessary since it's only a powder room, but it will be nice not to have to smell people going to the bathroom from other parts of the house. Plus if we ever decide to make it a full bath, the vent will already be there.




Here are the three switches for the bathroom, one for the light above the sink, one for the light in the ceiling and one for the fan in the ceiling. I hooked them to the breaker last night and everything worked well. You can see two of the outelts for the powderoom on the floor as well. All power in the bathroom is on a GFCI breaker.




Here is the light box for where the future light above the sink will go. It's taped off for now. I ran 12/3 here so that I could tie off and run to the outlet on the side of the sink. This was much easier than running wire from the outlets on the other side of the bathroom, plus I had extra 12/3 laying around.




Here is some of the wiring that was done in the front of the theater. It's certainitly not my nicest work, but I wanted to leave a bit of slack in case some of the outlets ever need to be moved. The top three outlets are hooked to the grafikeye and will be used to control lights behind the movie screen to create a "see through" screen so that you can see the speakers behind the screen. The bottom three outlets will be used by the subwoofers.




I got my a/v cables from monoprice.com this week. I ran one of the 25' component cables from the equipment closet to the projector to make sure it was long enough. Here you can see where the cables will be in the equipment closet.




Here is where the a/v cables exit the soffit for the projector. You can also see the pvc I ran. This is in case 2 years down the road there's a new technology type of cable that I need to run. It will make it really easy to run a new cable to the projector.




This is the soffit opening opposite the side where the a/v cables come in. I moved the receptacle over to this side so that the power wouldn't interfere with the video signals.




Here's an up to date shot of the basement:




I tore down part of the staircase wall to help open it up a bit. The railing will be replaced by a nice one with spindles once carpet and drywall is done. I'm hoping this makes it feel like another level to the house instead of a basement.