To Bury or Not Bury The Conduit?????

[newguy35]

Hey guys,

I'm going to be getting a tub soon.  I was wondering what everyone thought about the electrical hookup and whether or not to have the conduit go underground.  The tub will be pretty close to the house, so not a whole lot of the conduit would be visible if I don't bury it. I was told by an electrician if I do bury it I better be sure of the exact location of the tub. Burying the conduit would cost about another 80 - 100 on the hookup. I have a concrete guy coming out in the next couple weeks, so I need to decide if I want an underground hookup or not. Does it look that bad if u don't bury it? Do must people go with the underground or aboveground connection? What are the pros and cons? I value your feedback.

[jonnyboy2807]

I don't have concrete, it's just on a very thick compacted crusher-run pad with patio stones around the tub (about 4' from my house).  Consequently my electrician just used armored cable and buried it in the gravel (dug up a tiny 1" trench in the pad) until it came up to the surface just where it went into the tub pan.

I really appreciate being able to walk unobstructed all around the tub in the dark.

[Chas]

I try to talk my customers out of coming up directly into the tub. If the tub has to come down over the conduit, you will most likely have to put the tub in a different location than what you hoped for: between the time the electrician lays down the conduit and the time the concrete (or other surface) is completed, an ARMY of feet, tools, wheelbarrows and other items will be bent on relocating that conduit. In over two decades of doing this, I have had about five people successfully end up with the conduit RIGHT where they wanted it when it was time to set the tub down. The rest (and sadly there have been many) have had to set the tub off an inch, six inches, a foot, or some distance away from where they hoped for it to land. Some have had to cut off the conduit flush and run flex across the patio because they had planned to have the tub right next to some obstacle which prevented moving the tub to accommodate the final location of the tub. OR -they made the slab (or other surface) exactly the size they needed it for the tub in question, and the thing would have had to hang off one side to be able to use the conduit.

Obviously, I am directing this mainly to people pouring concrete, but I set a tub as recently as yesterday (10/12/12) where they had tried to run the conduit up through the bottom of the tub. It was a Sundance tub, and they had chosen to use a plastic fake slab on gravel, but they had a huge (1") conduit sticking up in the corner, and we ended up sliding the 'slab' over a foot, putting the spa down facing the wrong way, and they will have to get a bunch of people to tip up the tub, move the electrical, slide the 'slab' to the correct location, set the tub down and spin it (can't stand it up on the sides so it will have to be set back down and then be spun once it's back down) and THEN try to put the conduit up in the correct spot.

That's a lot of work - and the tub COULD have been up and running today if they had just not tried to guess about where to put the conduit, or at least asked me. I didn't sell this tub, so they didn't think of using me as a resource, and I was not interested in standing around for an hour while they dug up the conduit (I did offer to snap it off and let the job proceed, after which they could have dug it up from the side and gotten it going again..)

Wow - long answer! But my advice is this:

Come up right next to the spa, put in a small box of some type, and run 1/2" flex - or 3/4" if you absolutely have to - into the cabinet of the spa. The Sundance I was working on yesterday had two holes pre-drilled on the right and left corners of the tub, and it shipped with plastic plugs to close up unused openings. Our Caldera, Limelight and Hot Spot tubs have a similar arrangement. If you are really creative, you can get the box real low to the ground, and paint the whole thing to match - or set a pot over it, or put it where the steps will be - etc.

This is an "LB" and it's about the smallest box you can put in this type of installation - it is designed for the wire to be pulled through with no joint or junction - perfect for transitioning from underground to flex. And you can slip a reducing bushing in so the underground conduit can be 3/4" or 1" and the flex can be 1/2".



I have pictured one made of PVC, so you can glue to the end of PVC conduit, and glue in Non-Metalic Raintite Flex going to the spa. Low profile, no metal connectors, no muss, no fuss.

Our HotSpring tubs have a toe kick area that is about 1.5" deep, so I have the conduit come up at the BACK corner, and run 1/2" flex around the base of the tub from there. It almost disappears, and if you paint it black, it DOES disappear.

HTH

 

[jonnyboy2807]

Yeah, I should have clarified that he brought up the cable 1-2" from the tub and went into the side of the pan at ground level.  I had to shave out part of the bottom of the patio stone that went against the tub there, so the cable isn't visible.  All the measuring in the world still makes coming up from below seem like a puzzle not worth trying.

[Chas]

One of the cases where the conduit got moved was on a job owned by a real "I can do this when nobody else can" type of person. They absolutely shut me up as I was trying to get them to have the conduit come up at the back corner of the spa.

His idea was to pound in three stakes - strong stakes - one marking the location for the conduit to end up,and two more an equal distance from the final (hoped-for) location of the conduit. I hope I can make sense of this: They drove a stake where they wanted the conduit to end up, and then they drove two more stakes an equal distance away in two directions, 90 degrees apart. Say one was 5' to the north and the other was 5' to the east, and these extra stakes were outside the area to be covered by the slab and away from the 'action.'

The plan was that the guy could come home from work every day and very quickly and easily check that the conduit was still in position as the job progressed.

It was fine through removing the lawn.
It was fine through digging out the dirt.
It was fine through setting the forms.
It was fine through pouring sand/compacting it.
It was fine through installing the re-bar and bonding wires.
It was fine through trenching for the conduit itself.
It was fine through installing the final conduit and taping it closed.
It was fine through the concrete pour - in fact the owner was there watching the pour with his tape measure clipped to his belt.
It was fine through the concrete finishing - still there watching like a hawk.
It was fine through the curing process - two weeks waiting for delivery of the spa - and then -

It was off by about four inches when we tried to set the spa. He wanted me to drill up through the bottom of the tub, but I refused. He was furious, and launched an investigation into what happened. Turns out just about EVERY tradesman from the teenager who dug out the dirt to the final finishers had knocked over one or more of his stakes and had put it back where they thought it should be by guessing. In fact, as it turned out, it would have been easier to spot the problem if everyone who had knocked over a stake had simply left it laying on the ground so the owner could reset - because he had some simple back-up measurements over to his house which he never used because he thought the stake system was so fool-proof!

He ended up opening up a square hole by saw cutting into his nice new slab (not that tough since it was only a couple of weeks old) and we cut off the conduit underground, set the tub, drilled a hole exactly where it needed to be and then he connected to the conduit by a little tunneling and working under his new slab through the hole he had cut. Later he put a planter over the hole, and it was all good - except for the hard work he had gone through.

Murphy's law applies - if you set the conduit where you have lots of latitude for error or movement, chances are it will stay exactly where you placed it all the way through the job. If you absolutely have no room for error - especially if the tub cannot be moved by even an inch or two - then the conduit will end up set in concrete in the wrong spot. Works everytime.

BTW - the five people I have had who DID succeed all ended up moving the tub to a new location, but they were small little moves that didn't really effect the job. For example, one was about an inch, and we called that good because there were no space constraints at all: the tub was in the center of a large open space and being one inch off of center was no prob. Another of the ones who 'made it' actually had the conduit off by several inches, but they had planned to set the steps on that side, and so they just covered over the goof and were all smiles.

I had a list - with pictures -  of the five (four at that time) people who had succeeded in doing this, and this owner insisted on being added to the list of souls who 'beat the odds' and did what I said couldn't be done. We tossed the list after that. It was a bit dated anyway...

 

[Chas]

I'm sitting here thinking over the many jobs we have done which had some sort of challenge making the electrical connection invisible. I thought of another fun one:

We brought out a large spa - I'm thinking it was a Grandee at 1100 pounds empty, and 8'4" in length. I will sometimes offer to level these large spas even though the factory suggests setting them directly on a slab. Notice I didn't say that I offer this service free...

In this case, I brought my saw and a stack of redwood lumber, and we made about ten wedges, each one custom cut to support the tub on a sloping patio slab. We put down a bit of 'Liquid Nails' construction adhesive to hold them in place as we proceeded, and then we set the tub. It was perfect! Nice and level, yet supported well enough that the factory would be happy, AND the water could still drain away from the bottom of the tub because the sleepers all ran in the downhill direction.

We had worked with the owner to select the direction of the tub - and decided it would be cool to have the tub sitting about one foot in from the edge of the slab so that the electrician could core a hole down from the exact location they needed to enter the tub (under the door on HotSpring spas) and then he tunneled the short distance and ran his PVC conduit through a bit of open dirt and over to the sub panel. Invisible! Happy campers all around. Until his wife came home from her trip - we had put the spa so that the best seats in the house faced right at the back of the guy's house, and completely ignored the beautiful mountain views on all three other sides!!

Tear it out. Re-cut all the sleepers. Reset the tub. Rewire with flex going from the cored hole around the tub to the front...

It was on THAT very job that I first heard the description: "SWMBO"  - she who must be obeyed.

 

[jonnyboy2807]

It was on THAT very job that I first heard the description: "SWMBO"  - she who must be obeyed.

 

SWMBO ...I'm going to remember that one...