Tuesday morning it was time to finally tackle the snake pit of wiring and subpanels that infested…

Tuesday morning it was time to finally tackle the snake pit of wiring and subpanels that infested the camp’s original generator shack, which had ceased to house a generator decades ago and had become a storage shed and home to an electrical nightmare. The plan we came up with was to delete all the hodge-podge subpanels, remove as much as the poor wiring and overhead circuit drops as possible, and replace all that with a new bigger subpanel on that shack, and add a new large sub panel to the adjacent building. Seeing as a lot of the overhead drops were actually branch circuits from one building to another ( yikes!) this second new panel would now handle branch circuits duties for that structure.
You’ve seen a few pictures of this before. Here’s how it looked just before we began the removal process.

The more you look, the more entertaining it gets. 😬
Here’s the creative free air feeders to the first of 4 sub panels crammed in there. 🙄

Seems legit. 🤷‍♂️

Those yellow Romex cables actually feed circuits from their panel of origin and through this panel, again with no cable connections, and with the worst wiring termination devices yet invented installed as a bonus. And icing on the cake is the use of very wrong wire colors here and there. 🙄

As if all that wasn’t entertaining enough, when I disconnected one of these circuits from their power source, I got a nasty surprise-sparking wires! AC voltage present between a ground and neutral. Not really surprising considering, but always unpleasant to deal with.

Found this cute razor blade damaged UF cable conductor. It had somehow never faulted out after decades of being in an over stuffed panel. Kinda amazing.

Some more creative free air feeders from one panel to another. Don’t worry Boss, we used supports on those wires so it’s ok!😄😄🙄

The roof got even more entertaining once I got up on it. I’ll just let the pictures do the talking.

We had this mess pretty much removed by lunch.
Then came the challenge of putting Humpty back together again.
Hanging gear on rough rock walls is a challenge that requires some patience, skill, and creativity. And you have to be willing to overlook things that aren’t perfectly plumb or level.
After spending some time with a single jack, chisel, and an SDS drill, I was able to tune up the rock faces enough to get a reasonably good mounting surface for the new panel and junction box. There was nothing I could do for the previously poorly installed PVC sweep, I just had to live with its crookedness and shallow install depth. 🤷‍♂️
All-in-all, I think it came out pretty darn good.

By the time we spliced and landed the feeders, and pulled in and landed all the branch circuits, it was after 6 pm and pretty dark. Everything re-energized without issues, and that put about a quarter of the lower section of camp back in business.

Oh yeah-the mess from inside has been replaced with something I think looks and performs much better.

It had been another long day, but we managed to get done what needed to be accomplished, and that felt good. Hopefully we can keep up the pace, momentum, and progress in the coming days.