Setting up shop: installing a compressor

I helped a friend install his air compressor this weekend. It wasn’t a big job, from my perspective it was really only some electrical work we needed to do to provide a dedicated 20 amp circuit so the compressor could run without blowing the breaker.

I’ll call my friend BW. He has an affinity for old Buicks and he has a rather interesting collection that includes a 61 Electra (4DR HDTP), ’66 Skylark(4DR HDTP), and ’67 Electra (2DR HDTP).

We decided a couple of months ago that we would have an automotive day once a month and work on something together, so installing the electrical for the compressor was in preparation for this.

I have to admit, I am jealous of his garage. It is huge! I was laughing about how he has a set of outdoor motion detector security lights at one end of the garage that comes on as you approach the garage doors. He needs them since it is so dark at the other end because of the distance from the overhead lighting closest to the house. This space could truly be used as a commercial garage, it’s that big!

To give you some background, the house is in a historic part of Baltimore and the garage was once a horse stable for a local hotel. There is a carousel level with the floor near the door that was once used for turning horse carriages around after the horses had pulled it into the stable.

Naturally an old house has old wiring, with minimal capabilities so we had to think creatively to come up with a circuit with enough load capacity for an air compressor. BW had already tried running the compressor on a circuit that was on the garage wall but it kept blowing due to too many other things sharing the circuit.

I decided after tracing the wiring path that we weren’t going to try to pull more wire through the conduit, but that it made more sense to find a circuit that had little or nothing on it. We found one leading to the laundry room in the basement which was no longer a laundry room, but an unused space. It had a 20 amp circuit complete with 12 guage wire, perfect for driving the compressor.

We extended the circuit to the garage which was conveniently located behind the laundry room. We pulled the new wire through the wall and mounted a quad box on the other side of the wall, where we plugged in the compressor and let it run through it’s break-in cycle.

So, now it’s time for pizza and beer. OK…Pizza and more beer. We’ll soon decide what our next automotive day adventure will be, and I’ll write about that day shortly after.

Carl

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 25th, 2007 at 9:47 am and is filed under Automotive day. The entry is tagged under You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.