Electrician recommendation for hot tub hook up

[PaperBagger'14]

Originally Posted by Titan2

Sure, but will you hook up in the hot tub? That is the hard part.

I could but I charge too much

[Reggie28]

Originally Posted by PaperBagger'14

Can’t speak to when the rule changed on it but as of a few years ago a friend who has no journeyman or master tickets (engineer tech) was able to pull the electrical permit himself along with his basement as a homeowner.

https://www.calgary.ca/development/h...rical%20permit.

Also if you manage to trip the primary feeder going through your spa pack breaker, branch circuit breaker, main circuit breaker in your panel, through fault the transformer, bayonette fuses on the transformer primary, any auto switching PMH gear with built in protection, any fuse cutouts from lateral poles and finally landing back at your substation feeder breaker.

If you manage to kaboom all those layers of protection, I commend you and want to give you a hug.

It scares me a little that Joe Homeowner can work on his pool/hottub, even though with spa buddy packages it isn’t hard, until it is hard. The issue is electrocution risk if you do not have your grounding and the GFCI wired properly.

I hope working on your main is still protected.

Years ago, we built a test stand at our facility to test a piece of equipment with 2 x 1150hp motors. We had significantly lower power demands than what Enmax was supposed to deliver and had 3 overprotection devices. But the proof is in the doing. We could black out several blocks in the foothills industrial area at will. I’m assuming Enmax was either under powered or did not have their overcurrent coordination correct, but they couldn’t or wouldn’t fix it.

Funny part was, if it was a nice sunny Friday, the guys would pester me to do the hard accel/brake tests knowing it would mean paid time off for our facility and most of our neighbours. We had to change the procedure where we used our generators to power the high demand tests.

I think Enmax was getting suspicious of the blackouts on Friday afternoons, even though they came and looked at our setup and gave it the thumbs up.

[timun]

Out of curiosity, was this somewhere south of 68th Avenue?

[PaperBagger'14]

Originally Posted by Reggie28

It scares me a little that Joe Homeowner can work on his pool/hottub, even though with spa buddy packages it isn’t hard, until it is hard. The issue is electrocution risk if you do not have your grounding and the GFCI wired properly.

I hope working on your main is still protected.

Years ago, we built a test stand at our facility to test a piece of equipment with 2 x 1150hp motors. We had significantly lower power demands than what Enmax was supposed to deliver and had 3 overprotection devices. But the proof is in the doing. We could black out several blocks in the foothills industrial area at will. I’m assuming Enmax was either under powered or did not have their overcurrent coordination correct, but they couldn’t or wouldn’t fix it.

Funny part was, if it was a nice sunny Friday, the guys would pester me to do the hard accel/brake tests knowing it would mean paid time off for our facility and most of our neighbours. We had to change the procedure where we used our generators to power the high demand tests.

I think Enmax was getting suspicious of the blackouts on Friday afternoons, even though they came and looked at our setup and gave it the thumbs up.

Huh interesting, the basic theory of overcurrent protection coordination is that the nearest upstream device (the breaker powering those motors) should always be first to trip. Enmax wouldn’t have any say in the relay settings used by your facility and the lineman that would respond to it have a very basic knowledge about coordination. No one would say tickety boo.

Realistically if you were only tripping out a small handful of customers it’s probably something small like primary fuses on a transformer bank or a pad mount. When feeders trip out that’s when you’d lose a few thousand.

And yes, you need to have a master pull a permit to work on your main and I doubt that will ever change.