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Few electrical questions with my new build/room

Zarezhu

Member
Hey all,
I moved into an extremely private house with a lot of land. There is a detached garage out back, with a 30A breaker feeding it from the houses main panel. My plan is to replace it with a 60A breaker, I will NOT overload the 100A main panel as I wont be using much electricity in the home. I was hoping to run a grow inside a trailer with its own subpanel. I would park it right outside the garage, and run a line from the garages subpanel to the trailers subpanel.

First question:
Can I safely replace the 30A garage breaker from the main panel, with a 60A breaker, provided the gauge of the wiring to the subpanel in the garage is adequate enough? I will NOT overload the houses 100A panel, even with 50 amps continuous draw. I have gas appliances, I use little power regardless.

Second question:
Given that I have a 60A breaker feeding the subpanel in the garage, Can I also put in a 50/60A breaker into the subpanel inside the garage in order to run it to my LAST subpanel, the panel feeding the wiring for a 26' gutted trailer. This subpanel would have a 20A breaker for 240v lights, a 15A breaker for my minisplit, and a 15A breaker for my 120 outlets. This trailer would be the new grow room, and would be perfect as I could move it at a moments notice, and I would not be doing any permanent work to the house/garage.

Third question:
I know its tough to guess, but do the wires feeding the garages subpanel look like they are at least thick enough for a 60A breaker? They seem massive to me. I had a sparky run 120'+ of wire to my last indoor, which was also a 60A panel, and the gauge of the wire seemed significantly smaller.



I might as well add, I intend to have an electrician do all the work. I'm just hoping to get an idea from you guys before I go out and purchase the trailer and start dumping a bunch of money into this grow.

I would even love to upgrade the main panel, but I have 11 months left on this lease, and it may be too risky to ask the landlord if I could pay for a panel upgrade for no good reason.

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This is a pic of the wires going from the main panel to the subpanel in the garage.
 

Speed of green

Active member
You could replace the 30a breaker with a 60a, as long as the draw on the main is not more than 100a at any given time you are fine.

The wire in the picture looks like 10ga at the most, they could have ran multiple conductors in parallel. do you have a picture of the conductor where it feeds into the existing 30a breaker in the garage?

Depending on the distance between the garage and main panel you may run into voltage drop issues with a thinner conductor.
 
Can you just run a new 30 amp from the main panel? The more you "break" lines like you want to do a lot of efficiency is lost. Costing money not getting to the canopy growth. I recently stumbled upon a website that told you what gauge to run based on draw and length.
 

Zarezhu

Member
Hey all,
Thanks for chiming in.

Im not worried about voltage drop as the garage is maybe 50' from the main panel, the the trailer is going to be parked right up against the garage. I popped the cover off the subpanel today and the wires look massive (at least compared to my last room, which had 120'+ run at 55A).

20A should be fine for my 4k DE's @ 240v. I'll likely run the DE's at 750w.

Im not particularly worried about efficiency. I have extremely efficient equipment. I'm strictly going to use this room as a mother/clone/veg room for the majority of my lease. If Im lucky, I'll be able to renew the lease.

Here's what the inside of the subpanel looks like. They had a lot more circuits installed, but they removed the breakers and cut the wires for most of the outlets inside the garage.

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Im mostly wondering if it will be safe to Go from the main panel,
to the sub panel in the garage, to a second sub panel in the trailer.
I do not want to run a brand new wire from the main panel to the garage as I would have to remove it every time the landlord wants to check up on me. Id much rather pop in a 60A breaker into this subpanel, and run it to another sub panel inside the trailer. No permanent additions, and very easy to conceal
 

Speed of green

Active member
4k watts is going to pull 28 amps, so probably figure a 35-40amp breaker.

The wire gauge needed for 60amps in aluminum is #4 not to be confused with 4/0

the wire pictured looks like it could be #4... hard to gauge from the photo.

This is a chart that has the wire diameter and gauge, kind of a rough guess but hopefully it will help ypu make a decision.

good luck!

https://www.rapidtables.com/calc/wire/wire-gauge-chart.html
 

Zarezhu

Member
Lights will be 240v speed, so 4.5ish amps per 1kw if I run them at a killawatt. I don't have the headroom in a trailer to run Des at 1kw, so I'll likely be running 4 lights at 750w/3.5A each.

The wire looks from 2-4 gauge, unsure reqlly though. I know its muuuch wider than my 8 gauge wire that powered the last room. I'm surprised there's no writing on the wires ><

I'll have an electrician come soon. If it's safe to run a subpanel off a subpanel, I'll have the room going by the end of the month :D

Thanks for chiming in!
 

Drop That Sound

Well-known member
750 watts over scrog nets works good in a 6' high trailer ;)

Looks like you got room to pop in another breaker. Then again maybe they just went ahead and used a large panel for the 2 15 amp breakers, and 30 amp wiring..

I went with a 70 amp 2 breaker panel for my trailer. I cut the end off a nice fat weather resistant 50 amp Camco 30' RV power cord from amazon, and wired it right into the bottom of the sub panel.

At the main box outside (not a sub panel like your garage) I put a 220v 50 amp breaker, and ran a few feet of flex conduit and wires to a 50 amp female plug mounted on the a post, 10 feet from the trailer.

The main 50 amp breaker is 220 but I basically split it back into 2 120s at my panel, and have 2 double breakers ( a dual 20 amp in one slot and a dual 15 in the other) for a total of 4 circuits.

I don't ever plan on using more than 40 amps so i'm not worried that I used a 70 amp panel off a 50 amp breaker, I just have more circuits to play with when I need.

Its a nice setup and I can simply unplug and go if I wanted!

I don't see why you couldn't do the same, 50 and 30 amp is more popular for trailers\RVs.

As far as hooking up a sub panel to a sub panel, the most important thing I can think of, besides making sure your wire gauges and the breaker that feeds the garage panel are big enough, is whether or not you need to use the neutral bonding screw?
 

Papa-Woodie

New member
You only need to bond your neutral to the ground at your first point of contact from the meter bank ie. your main panel. VERY IMPORTANT!! Cover all your aluminum terminations with NoLux. NoLuX keeps the copper termination points and the aluminum wiring able to work together without causing a fire. Aluminum heats and cools at dufferent temps, eventually causing arcing to happen, which in turn melts the wires and thats how electrical fires start. And if your in an illegal state, the fire world just be the start of any problems.
 

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