Power Upgrade for the Garage

The recently purchased Grizzly bandsaw arrived pre-wired for 220v, and is rated 10A at 220v.  To use it initially I had to rewire it for 110v, but at 20A, it’s just too inefficient to use on a regular basis.

The long put off garage power upgrade would have to finally get completed.

Luckily there’s plenty of capacity in the main panel, it’s rated at 200A.  To get started, 1″ conduit was routed from the main panel to the sub-panel in the garage.  Since the main panel is located in the basement, that particular task was not too difficult to complete.  There are several bends, 90 and 45 degrees and those can be purchased pre-bent (Menards is the cheapest for that).  However there were a couple that were odd sized and for that a conduit bender was required.

The sub-panel location was determined, it was installed and conduit connected to it.  As a final check, a multimeter was used to make sure the ground connection was good.  To do this, the cabinet was checked against the ground of an outlet on a different circuit, it was a dead short.  Once the conduit was routed, all connections secure, then the 6 gauge stranded copper wire was pulled through using a fish tape.  A total of three wires, two hot and one neutral were required (the neutral is required because there will be 110v circuits in addition to the 220v).

An existing 110v 20A circuit was located behind peg board, all of that had to be removed and new conduit was run (the boxes and some of the conduit could be reused).

New conduit runs in place, the peg board frame was recreated using 3/4″ AC plywood.

Wiring completed, there are two separate 110v circuits and 2 separate 220v circuits, one for each side of the garage.  A bit overkill, but it’s nice to have the capacity.

 

Now there are plenty of outlets, virtually eliminating the need for extension cords.  The bandsaw was rewired for 220V and the plug was changed to a 220V 20A twist-lock style.  Next, the tablesaw will be required for 220V as well.

 

 

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