Electricity can be very dangerous and if you have no knowledge and experience in this field then please skip this blog. This is not a tutorial, I will just go through steps I did when securing my electric installation with plastic conduit. Again, if you don’t have the knowledge then get a specialist to sort out your electrics. You are solely responsible for your safety and actions. Be responsible.
Before you do any work involving electrics you MUST TURN OFF THE ELECTRICTY.
The first thing I had to do was to remove plastic pins that were holding the electric wires, these just go inside of pre-drilled holes in the walls. Later on, I will use those holes to secure plastic clips that will hold the plastic conduit pipes.
To remove them I’m just using some pliers and pull them out of the wall. The holes are 6mm so I will use 6mm wall plugs to install the mounting clips.
The next step is just to cut the plastic conduit to the right size. For that I was using a Japanese pull saw, but any hand saw or even chop saw will do the job just fine. The plastic conduit cuts really easily.
For any corners you can use a flexible corner conduit, it makes the work so much easier and you don’t have to worry about how to bent the plastic pipe. Thanks to the bendable corner conduits you can fit your installation exactly where it needs to go.
When you got all the parts for your installation just pull through the conduit all the electric wires and connect them together. The plastic pipes I've got are larger from one side. That means they will connect together to create any lengths you need.
On some occasions mishaps happen and your electric wire becomes too short (for some strange reason 😊)
In my installation to connect all the electric wires I’m using compact splicing connectors. And in the case above, I have used them to extend the cables. They are so easy to use, very durable and speed up the process of connecting wires immensely. The only downside is that they are not the cheapest way of connecting electric wires. But for me they are really the best and I would not go back to anything else. Here are the splicing connectors that I would recommend to anyone from WAGO
As you can see the whole process of installing the plastic conduit is a fairly straight forward. You do need some basic knowledge about working with electricity etc. And if you do not possess that, then please get a professional to do the installation for you.
I have also added four light switches around the workshop/ garage. Why so many? I will explain.
In total I have ordered twelve LED tube lights. The ones I got are ultra-budget and I would not recommend them really. But if you want to see a solid product that is similar to what I got here is a link.
My garage is divided in an exact half by a steel beam on the ceiling. Therefore, I will place 6 lights on one side and 6 on the other. The main light switch is near the door and the wires are coming out in the middle of the ceiling. I will connect 4 lights to that middle wiring. The rest of the lights will be controlled by the additional 4 switches, switching on and off 2 lights at a time. That will allow me to use only the lights that I need and when I need them. Saving money on electricity is the key factor here. I can imagine that all the lights will only be switched on when filming. But in most cases I will only turn on the lights that are the nearest to a workstation that I’m currently using.
The lights are fairly straight forward to attach to the ceiling, but a bit of assembly is required at least in my case. If you want to see the whole process on how to connect everything together, then head to my YouTube channel and watch my video.
Thanks for reading my blog.
Tomasz Franczyk