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jimlongley wrote:But there won't be any conduit unless you provide it, and fish it, and have your electrician wire it (it won'r be legal for you to wire it unless you are a licensed electrician) and hook it up.

With the price of direct burial cable vs the price of 60ft of conduit, there's no reason not to have it properly protected. As for the rest, it's not a whole lot more work than getting it properly put up above ground, and reduces the potential for future issues.

And of course, it wouldn't have to be your dog that dug it up, maybe you decided to plant some roses or fence posts along the property line of the house you just bought with buried facilities, and you hit them yourself, I can posit literally thousands of possibilities, most of which would not involve your ninja trainer.

And none of which address the fact that there are already things running under my yard that will cost me a lot if I break them. Therefore, I avoid breaking them. The simple fact is, I don't have drunken backhoe contests in my yard, and any contractor I hire is insured against such things.

Don't forget, I spent an entire career dealing with buried and underground facilities. Everything on your side of the meter is your responsibility, and you can denigrate the 60 feet of wire as being mere bagatelle, but when it comes to dealing with a buried fault, it is very complicated to find and fix.

Why would I (or any electrician worth using) look for the fault? It's 60 feet: unhook both ends and pull it out, using it to fish a new line in the process. We're not talking about a five mile run that needs heavy machinery. I don't use a TDR on the cable for my mobile antenna when it fails for the simple reason that anything requiring more than $30 worth of equipment is more expensive and time consuming than pulling a new cable.

I have seen buried power service drops, put in by the power company, not by an electrical contractor hired by the homeowner, that ended up almost on the surface after final grading and erosion took place.

But have you ever seen an overhead residential water supply or sewer? I bet the same specialized techniques that allow water pipes to be buried will work with conduit when properly applied.

jimlongley wrote:So you get a law passed which says all power companies have to have their neighborhood distribution lines and service drop buried. Who is going to pay for it?

In case you haven't seen the news lately, passing such a law would just be a way of getting us some benefit out of money we'll be losing anyway. I'd rather have it go to clearing out the spiderweb over the town than to some alcoholic Chinese prostitutes or lifetime resort plans for terrorist suspects.

By all means put all the meters at the curb, but remember that you will be responsible for everything beyond the meter, including if your dog digs up part of the service drop and it develops a high resistance short to ground, which spins your meter merrily for power you are not using, and how do you prove which watt you used and which was accidental.

If my dog digs up a buried conduit, chews through it, and I don't notice, I'm suing his sharkninja trainer. There are plenty of things that can spin the meter inside my walls that are much less protected than a few yards of cable in conduit under a foot or more of dirt.

ninemm wrote:Also, the customer would be responsible for any repairs to those wires.

Gee, a whole 60 feet of that high-tech plastic-wrapped copper added to the hundreds of feet I'm already responsible for. That's a terrrifying thought.

The electric company stops at the meter. Since it looks like the lines that serve your home are in the back (between Lockwood and Melissa), there would need to be a vehicle accessible alley for this to be viable. Otherwise, the meter reader would still have to go through your yard to read the meter.

Great. Maybe then the electric company could convince the city to mow the alley.

Even without the horror for me of having to worry about that piece of wire, and the horror of some reader having to drive through waist-high grass, there's still remote reading. Other industries, and for that matter, other electric companies, have been doing it for a while.

ninemm wrote:What they should do is to give you the three months the PUC dictates for you to have your meter moved to an accessible location.

The line coming to my house has an interesting feature; there are two ends on it. One of them isn't even on my property at all. All the electric companies need to do is put the meters on the supply end of those lines in the first place, and they won't even have to move up to last-century technology like remote reading.

jimlongley wrote:I would think with all of the tree damage t power lines shown in the various media, that people would have a better understanding of just how poorly power lines and trees get along.

How about making the electric companies actually do something proactive about the situation? There are lots of places in the world where all utility lines are buried. They're not an eyesore, don't blow down every time the wind exceeds 3mph, and don't get tangled up in trees.