We finished up the infamous electrical pedestal on Friday. It took us about 3 full days of work to get it done. Now, the three days were spread out over about 5 due to rain delays and runs back and forth to Home Depot.
The pedestal is a required item by the electric company here in Puerto Rico. The meter needs to be no less than 5ft up from the ground and the top of the galvanized pipe needs to be 5ft from the meter. Once all of the cement was dry we are at about 8ft to the meter box with exactly 5ft to the top of the galvanized pipe (this is where the electric company will feed all of their wire into our box giving us power).
We had to build the box on a hill and we were dealing with a lot of huge boulders under ground, so we erred on the side of caution and made it a little bit bigger so we wouldn’t have to tear it out and do it again. All of our estimated for a meter pedestal were between $2500 and $3000 but we installed it ourselves for a little under $900 including labor. As long as it passed inspection (which it did), it was a good move. I definitely would have been kicking myself if we had to rip it down and redo it.
Here are some pictures I took over the construction of the electric pedestal to completion. At this point, the only thing not done is filling in the giant ditch we needed dig to bury the 3x 1/0 wire and Number 6 ground wire in 2 inch PVC, the coaxial cable, CAT5 for up to 4 phone lines and two extra pipes. One 1 inch pipe to run power back up to the top of the property for a gate and lights and another 2” pipe for our second meter which could eventually have 3 more 1/0 and a ground. The second meter is so we don’t have to spend another $3k in a couple of years if we ever decide to build another house on the property to rent or sell. It only cost us about $200 more to do it now…so we went for it.
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