Restoring power to a moblie home community
A large moble home complex in San Jose suffered a disrumption in power service to its units. Their underground electrical wire was installed in the 1950s and was now failing. Their electrician recommended a complete replacement of the underground wires between the subpanels.
In the short term, generators were brought in to supply power which was a large weekly expense. The long term solution was to install new wire underground. Fortunately for us, the mobile park office connected us for a quote to install the underground conduit.
Using an old blueprint, we located where we expected the new electrical conduit to go and where there may be other buried utility lines we did not want to hit. Our original plan was to use our directional drill, a trenchless method, to avoid the need to open a large trench across the complex. We would still need to dig at the areas we expected to encounter other burried utility lines so that we would not distrub them.
As we started to dig, we found the utlity lines were not where we expected them from the plans. Thus, we ended up doing an open trench by hand. Digging by hand allows for the most careful excavation and is necessary if there is a high chance we could accidently hit/break an existing underground utility. While we always want to use trenchless methods wherever possible, sometimes, such as in this case, digging an open trench is the best solution.
We installed over 600′ of electrical conduit, crossing under several lots and private streets.
Connection to sub-panel, underneath other utility wires.
