The big shop electrical upgrades thread [long, 56 pics]

[FliesLikeABrick]

This post continues into the first 2 replies due to per-post picture limits. All pictures are thumbnails but higher-resolution is available if you click the thumbnail.

Our shop building was put in place by the previous owners of our house shortly after they purchased, around 2000-2001. The house is fairly small, and one of the coupleship was a musician -- teacher/instructor, performer with routine travels, some writing and recording at home, etc. They built the shop, a 48x60 pole barn, with the intention of finishing a substantial portion of the footprint as a music studio and office space.

You can see my other thread at https://www.hobby-machinist.com/threads/set-up-a-wood-shop-h-m-sacrilege.97651/ regarding building a woodshop in part of the space that they had finished for office and music-oriented use.

In general, the building was lacking in electrical infrastructure. Facts:

• The building has its own 200A split-phase meter/service
• The main panel is in the garage
• The only outlet in the garage was a duplex outlet right next to the panel, 4' off the ground
• In the garage (roughly 20x30), there were only 2 fluorescent fixtures (13' ceiling), insufficient lighting for a garage
• There were no outlets on the exterior of the building
• In the semi-finished hallway there are 2 strings of duplex outlets on 15a breakers, fed by the main panel via 12/2 romex along the ceiling
• Reasonable fluorescent lighting in the hallway
• Insufficient lighting in the finished space (where the woodshop was built) - 2 fluorescent fixtures for a 40x25 ft room

The more important facts...

• In the back room which I was setting up as the metal shop, there were zero outlets and zero lights
• I had been surviving with my workbench which had a small task light and some outlets mounted on it
• The bench was in turn fed via SO cable from an outlet in the hallway
• Some overhead lights I mounted were just plugged into the bench when I wanted them
• Everything else in the room plugged into the bench

Prior to having power, there were no machines except a tabletop drill press, a shopvac, and a tripod light in the back shop... this is what any task back there looked like.





The initial goals of the electrical upgrade project, which I had roughly sketched out with a floorplan of the building:

• Install a 100A subpanel in the back/metal shop for mechanical/noisy electrical loads in that room and the back wall of the garage
• Design a conduit system that is versatile for future expansions/changes, as machinery and benches are added or moved around
• Conduit/etc should be mounted above the doors and windows, to allow for straight/easy wire pulls. Ideally step-stool height instead of 6-12ft ladder height for access/work
• Mount the main overhead conduit/wireway on unistrut that can be used to mount other systems such as compressed air
• General-purpose quad boxes on GFCI
• L14-20 twist-lock receptacles for bench- and wall-mounted power strips, so that 120v and 240v are both available; and benches/strips can be moved
• Improve lighting everywhere
• Additional enhancements for computer equipment, including another 100A subpanel to keep computer hardware from seeing voltage drop that would be seen if the metal shop subpanel was shared (with possible high load/inrush currents, etc)
• Everything safe and to code.

Those are the general goals. There were more ideas, and changes along the way - which will be explained as we go through the project below.


To start, I estimated the length and quantity of major materials needed. Specifically, things I knew I could not just pop out and buy in retail; or things I could buy in bulk now to save effort and/or money:

• 170ft of 4x4 wireway/wire trough (17x 10ft sticks), and couplers/elbows for the same
• 2 Square D QO 100A main-breaker subpanels; with ground bars and covers for the same. One panel for the metal shop covered in this post, another panel for computer/resistive loads later on.
• 100A breakers for the main panel (also a QO panel)
• Various single-pole and double-pole breakers for the circuits I anticipated installing
• A bundle each of 1/2 and 3/4 EMT conduit; bundle of unistrut
• 175ft of 2/0, 2/0, 2/0, 1awg Al SER cable for the subpanel feeds
• A case each of Raco 4" square junction boxes and outlet boxes (with 1/2 and 3/4 knockouts)

This first (only) delivery was about $2500 from a local electrical supply house





Around the time this was all delivered, we had just finished building the woodshop space. The electrical requirements in here were simple and along a single wall. This seemed like a good space to prototype the unistrut approach as well as the wire trough, and it also did not depend on either of the subpanels being installed.

So above I mentioned conduit being used. While plenty of conduit is used, the main runs in each room are in 4x4 wireway. This is for a number of reasons:

• Versatility. This is easier to make changes in over time, without worrying about conduit or junction boxes filling up.
• Similarly, I can just punch new holes whenever I want to drop a new conduit run or junction box out of it
• In a large conduit system, effectively all your junction boxes along the main trunk/path need to be determined on day one. There is no chance to splice a box into the pipe system later on, without pulling all the existing conducors back. Wireway does not have this problem.
• For equipment that uses twistlock connectors, those can be mounted directly under the wireway instead of needing to figure out a nice way to have them hang from a junction box (without undue strain on the connector protruding 90 degrees from the wall)
• Even oversizing conduit... in the metal shop, a 1" conduit could easily fill up when you are talking about 6awg or 8awg conductors for welder outlets, etc. Not to mention having to consider code inputs on conduit fill/sizing, derate conductors as you add more current-carrying conductors, etc. Wireway does not have this problem without insane numbers of conductors being present

Locally, wireway ended up costing $55 per 10ft stick. Cheaper than I originally expected this to be, which helped sway the decision as well.

I ordered enough to use on most walls in the back shop; 1 or 2 walls in the woodshop, the back wall of the garage, and maybe a few other small areas.

Ok so back to the woodshop...

On the longest wall of the woodshop, which is near the building's main panel, I placed 20" pieces of unistrut on every 3rd stud - giving 4' spacing. This would give 2-3 points of support per stick of wireway.



There were two challenges solved during installation of the unistrut and wireway:
- The interior walls of the building use sheet metal studs. How do you attach to these meaningfully?
- How can I hang 10' sticks of wireway by myself, to avoid needing to bring my wife in every 15-30 minutes throughout portions of the project?

For the studs, the solution is to place toggle bolts in the exact center of the stud so that it can expand within the cavity of the stud. Between a studfinder (for coarse location), and exploratory drilling with a 1/16" drill bit (for precise location), it was easy enough to locate the center of the stud, within 1/8". Drilling a 9/16 hole and dropping 3x 3/16 toggle bolts for each 20" piece of unistrut -- this seemed plenty strong for hanging the wireway plus future compressed air and dust collection lines.

For hanging wireway by myself, I found that I could use some longer 3/8 bolts and large washers to place temporary "studs" that would hold the wireway. This would allow me to adjust the wireway vertically to level it; and then mark and drill for holes to place the bolts and spring nuts that would permanently fasten it to the unistrut.






In the wood shop I had an additional challenge to overcome about how to have the conduit drops leave the back of the wireway to extend downwards. This is desirable in the woodshop because I wanted to keep space open on the unistrut, below the wireway, for future dust collection to be hung on the same wireway. I used some tight-radius 90deg elbow fittings that were terrible to pull wire through -- I'm glad I only needed to do 3 of these, and would not deploy more.

The wireway in the woodshop is fed directly from the main panel, via 1" EMT conduit along the ceiling. This allows some room for fishing future conductors in case new circuits are needed for equipment over time.



At this point I was loving the space and versatility of the wireway, and had dialed in my installation processes that would be used elsewhere in the building

My pigtails were a bit long for junctions, but with the extra space in the wireway I did not hesitate to make things easier for my future self.



Woodshop done for now, it successfully provided the proof-of-concept for how we would mount the wireway on unistrut in the other shop.





Time to start hanging unistrut in the back shop.




Thanks to having the unistrut+wireway solution ironed out in the woodshop, pretty quickly I was at a point where I wanted to hang the unistrut and subpanel. However, this depended on running the feed from the main panel, so I could place the subpanel and not have to fight to route the wire behind the wireway.


This is where we get into a side project. You see, this building is a 48x60 pole barn with a truss roof. The roof trusses are on 10' centers, with 2x6 stringers run between the bottom chords of the trusses. Even if I was a taller person, there is no way to walk around safely in the attic on that 4x10ft framework. Additionally, there is nothing to grab onto overhead - the peak of the roof is 8 to 10 feet above the truss chords.



The 2x6 stringers attach inside of the truss lower chords



So we need to build a walkway. However, the access to the attic is over the garage and is only approximately 20x30 inches in size.



Downstairs, I prototyped a section of walkway that could run down the middle of the attic (under the peak of the roof), and sit on top of the lower truss chords. 10' long sections, joined together rigidly, forming one long 60' walkway down the center of the attic. Each section is two 2x6x10 on edges, with 1/2 sheets of plywood screwed to the top and some additional stringers screwed in to strengthen under the plywood.

All of this was cut to length downstairs, brought up in pieces, and assembled in the attic. The assembled sections were just too heavy to bring up a ladder and maneuver into the attic.




To gain access from the center out towards the eves, I put pairs of 2x6x10s on their side, with a half sheet of plywood. These formed portable planks with the 2x6es protruding from the end, so that two abutting ones can overlap each other on top of a stringer.

 

[FliesLikeABrick]

Now that the attic is safely accessible, it is time to pull in the panel feed for the metal shop. A temporary rig made out of pallets and scrap held the spool, as my wife fed the cable up to me in the attic.

The feed is oversized by 2 sizes for the 100A subpanels. At 75C, I could have used 1AWG Aluminum, but I went with 2/0 which at 75C has an ampacity of 135A (it might even be 90C-rated, with 150A ampacity in the right circumstances), because:
- This is running through an attic, with a higher ambient temperature which could prompt derating
- Oversizing, in case someone was so inclined to install a 125A or larger subpanel in the future
- Also a benefit of oversizing -- voltage drop during high draw (specifically motor inrush currents) would be appreciably reduced.




The walkway provided a good central path that the feed cable could be attached to, meeting the code requirements for attaching the horizontal run of cable.





Dropping the cable down into the metal shop allowed for the confidence to mount the panel. Due to the sheet metal framing in the wall and for increased versatility, the panel was mounted on two horizontal pieces of unistrut.





Now starting to hang wireway in the back, since the panel location and feed are finalized




Anxious to get the first machines powered via the new infrastructure, I pulled in the first few branch circuits:
- 240v@30a for the larger lathe (Harrison 10AA/Colchester Chipmaster) - and any other machines that should be on a 30a (shared) circuit
- 240v@15a for the smaller lathe (Logan 200) and mill (Rockwell 21-100)



Straightforward to pull conductors in for those from the panel. Directly attached to the underside of the wireway is a 4" outlet box and then the appropriate twistlock connector over each machine.







But let's back up a minute. A few things need to be solved to get these machines hooked up and working:
- The larger lathe's VFD is very poorly wired by a previous owner
- Additionally, the VFD is mounted too close to the top of the machine to allow new cabling to be properly installed
- The smaller lathe and mill's motors and drum switches are currently wired for 120v, and I don't have wiring diagrams or documentation for them



Improving the larger lathe's VFD mounting would require making new standoffs, so let's tackle the small lathe first so that we can then make the standoffs.

The first step was reverse-engineering the existing wiring and components of the motor. Unfortunatelyh the motor was not wired in a manner consistent with its labeling, so I created a truth table and measured the resistance and capacitance between every wire and post inside the motor's junction box:



From this I labeled and identified where each component likely was, and could then wire it properly to the drum switch in a safe manner that is correct for swiching two hot legs in a reversible manner.


Now I could use the Logan 200 to make some larger standoffs to mount the VFD higher on the Harrison, so that it can be rewired

Here is the wiring of the VFD beforehand (after I already removed the inlet cable).

Some issues:

• The strain reliefs are totally wrong. They are tiny clamps meant for 12 or 14 awg NM cable
• The cable (10/3 SO cable with 600v insulation) barely fits through a 1/2 knockout, let alone a strain relief mounted in a 1/2 knockout. This is even worse for the power going out to the motor, which is 12/4 600V SO cable
• The person who wired this up opted to strip the outer insulation off, chop the ground off, and clamp the remaining conductors in the strain relief. In theory the ground might be loosely connected to the chassis of the VFD, but not at all reliably.
• The same was true of both the inlet power cable as well as the power going out to the motor.

To fix this, we would need to raise the VFD up further away from the machine, install compression cord rips appropriate for the cable, enlarge the knockouts to 3/4 trade size, properly terminate the stranded wire in lugs for the terminal strip, and properly ground everything



and "after" -- notice that the VFD sits higher with the new standoffs. 10/3 SO 600V SO cord going to the machine, as well as up to the twistlock at the wireway



Here is new wire, terminated into crimp-on spade lugs. If I was doing this again maybe I wouldn't use insulated terminals to save some room.

Proper strain reliefs in the larger knockouts, grounds terminated, etc.





Continuing around the back shop, and starting to add the next layer of features: quad boxes. In this room (and any others with the wireway overhead), all outlets are above the bench level.

In addition to the machine drops and bench drops, I wanted to place GFCI-protected quadboxes at regular intervals around the room. Each half of the quadbox is on a different breaker, so that two moderate-power demands can be used in close proximity without tripping a breaker (such as grinders or my small 120v MIG welder at the same time as a fume extractor).

The first 2 outlets in the chain are GFCI so that everything downstream is protected -- however in hindsight I probably should have just gone with GFCI breakers for simplicity. I honestly can't remember why I didn't do this, or just didn't consider it. Maybe I had already purchased all my breakers by the time I realized I wanted GFCI for the general-purpose outlets?

These outlet boxes are fed from 1/2 EMT drops. All are the same length, and have the same 2 offsets bent so that the pipe mounts flush to the wall (2.5" offset out of the wireway, and standard 3/8" offset for the outlet box itself).

The black SO cable in the foreground is the temporary feed for the overhead lighting, this is addressed later.





At this point the panel is getting more populated, with most of the remaining branch circuits for this room pulled in:
- 2x 20A for the GFCI quad boxes
- 2x 20A for the NEMA L6-14 receptacles to feed bench-mounted power
- 50A for the welding table
- 15A for overhead lighting and shared with any hard-wired task lighting

Plus room for remaining work in the garage, whose back wall (shared with the panel wall of the metal shop) would be fed from this panel, including a future compressor.

 

[FliesLikeABrick]

Using 2x3s and some brackets made to fit the unistrut behind the lathes, I made 16' of task lighting that hang directly overhead the working area of both lathes, the mill, and the vertical bandsaw. This is in front of the operator, so no more working in dim light or one's own shadow. A switch by the panel controls this hardwired task lighting

The frame supporting this can also hold small amounts of linear materials for storage, like some 1" by 10ft lengths of angle iron I have on hand for an upcoming project.



The room has 6 walls because of how a wider section of the hallway (outside the room) pushes the wall in. The wireway ended up being installed from the panel (on the wall shared with the garage), down the long exterior wall, the short exterior wall, and a short interior wall to reach the welding table. It would have been more efficient to reach the welding table via the 15' interior wall between it and the panel's wall (the other way around the room); however, that wall has ended up being used almost exclusively for storage. I think in the long-term, it may have storage that goes all the way to the ceiling (a la the bin walls in Mythbusters' shop), so having wireway and unistrut halfway up the wall would almost certainly be an inconvenience for setting up ideal long-term storage.

The 4 pictures below show the final path of the wireway and location of machine drops, quad boxes, and other features.

I did end up adding a total of 6x 3/4" EMT extending from the breaker panel up to the wireway, to keep from having to derate my conductors too far. However, with the conductors' insulation being 90C-rated, even at 70% derating they still maintain the expected ampacity (12awg for 20a, etc).

If I was doing this again, I would have put all of those stubs from the panel in at once. It was quite a pain installing them after the fact, because it required loosening the setscrews on the existing stubs, the fasteners for the panel itself, and shifting everything down just enough (temporarily) so that a new stub could be forced into place.






Remaining is finalizing some temporarily-wired lighting improvements as well as proceeding into the garage.



The overhead lighting consists of 10x 24W LED integrated tube fixtures. With some friends, we placed a wholesale order (~150 total fixtures) and got these for ~$8/ea. Rows of 3-4 fixtures come back to handyboxes which aggregate and tie into 3-way switches placed at the 2 doors to the shop




In this picture you can see the temporary SO cable being used to feed the lights





Since I had installed this previously, it was simple enough to permanently wire it in. I pulled the 15a lighting circuit through the wireway, along with a neutral and travelers for the 3-way switching. To replace the temporary feed, I bent 1/2" EMT to reach from the ceiling down to the wireway, so that it could be fed from the nearer of the 3-way switches.



Now moving onto the garage -- I hung about 15' of wireway along the back wall, in the same manner as elsewhere.



This is fed by 4x 3/4" EMT that goes straight through the wall and into the back of the wireway on the other side of the wall, near the metal shop's subpanel






The garage has its own GFCI quad boxes along the back wall, wired identically to the metal shop




One of which is used for the small compressor for now






The garage had extremely poor lighting - just 2x fluorescent fixtures and a single switch by the garage door. This was upgraded very similar to the back shop with rows of the same LED fixtures and 3-way switching at the garage door and inside the hallway.

In theory these fixtures are 3000lm each, giving a total of 54,000 lumens. In this space, that is approximately 100 lumens per square feet.





That about captures the electrical upgrades for the garage and shop. There are various other small enhancements, but this is the main thrust of the design, features, and process involved.

Lots of material left over, for modifications over time (including adding power to another wall in the garage and woodshop). This has since gotten organized more, but was constantly in a state of disarray when fishing through or materials - or sorting out materials purchased at auctions.




It is neat to have this project written up in one place, and I hope it might help others brainstorm how they might perform similar work in their own space. When planning this work out, I had ideas about what I wanted and how I wanted to do some of it, but .... man, I really wish I had someone else's home projects to reference, and ideally with details to help it materialize.

Specifically I did more pondering and research on these items, than if I had someone to discuss with up front:

• Panel sizing. I went with 100A main breaker panels (instead of main lug). I opted for the main breaker so that there was a local disconnect available at the subpanel, although this is not required by NEC. I opted for 100A panels because smaller ones just had an obscenely small number of breaker slots available. I could have gone larger, with a 200A or 250A panel
• General material selection, such as wireway vs conduit; panel feed options (individual conductors in conduit vs SER cable, etc)
• Order-of-operations. Mount panels or run feeds first? Start with the most-complex room (high reward) or the simplest room/features first (faster results and ability to pivot)? Figure out the entire walkway situation in the attic before even purchasing electrical materials for the project?
• Using unistrut to mount the wireway - whether there is a more-common approach, etc
• Best practices for attaching loads to walls studded with sheet metal framing. This one may sound silly, but in the planning stages of this I was worried I would be resorting to hanging wireway from toggle bolts that only used the drywall for strength. It took a bit to realize that I could and should take the time to reliably place toggle bolts into the exact center of the vertical framing.

Things I would do differently:

• At the onset of the project, I had pretty bad "paralysis by analysis"... Trying to figure out what to do first, how many outlets and other components in each room... whether to buy a truck first or a small utility trailer for our Civic so that I can pick up materials like bundles of conduit more easily? It gets out of hand quickly. I eventually realized that I should only plan out the major components up front, get those delivered in the large order from the supply house, and let the rest follow as the project progresses. I could have saved a lot of time and energy if I had made that judgement call earlier. This manifested in decisions about how to feed the panels (individual conductors in pipe? Above or below the ceiling? Wireway under the ceiling? SER cable under the ceiling instead of in the attic? Pay the power company to deliver power to the other side of the building, maybe 3ph?)
• This is minor, but the covers I bought for the subpanels were not the spring-loaded QO covers. These are the plain metal ones, which don't feel like they fit as satisfyingly as the ones with a preload spring between the two pieces of the cover (the flat outer panel, and the recessed inner panel that pushes on the breaker faces). The shop's main panel has the nicer of the two.
• I started going to local auctions after having the majority of this work done. At those auctions, I ended up getting large lots of random electrical components for very cheap, but no longer needed most of them and they largely sit in my inventory now for small improvements and projects here-and-there. I would have liked to start going to auctions prior to this project, when I had a rough idea of the BOM so that I could stock up on cheap inventory. So much of this could have been done with used or new-old-stock components instead of buying new! Not just for cost reasons, but it is always great to reuse items if there is not a clear safety concern.
• In certain areas, I think I might have put taller lengths of unistrut in to allow for additional items to be mounted securely on the wall. The best example is shelving that could be bolted to the unistrut, especially if it was on a wall that had sheet metal framing and the unistrut could make it both more usable and more rigid.

Tools of high value to a project like this:

• Greenlee Slug Buster knockout punch set (7235Bb). SUPER helpful, and basically mandatory with the wireway. The wireway has almost no knockouts in it from the factory, and they are never where you want them - especially when you're trying to mount it nicely and put reasonable offsets in your pipe work. Sure you can use a step drill bit but that makes a huge mess, takes about the same amount of time, and ends up with a less-nice result. Also since so many of my holes were needed overhead, it would constantly be raining hot chips down.... I picked up my Slug Buster set used on eBay prior to this project
• Portable/handheld bandsaw - specifically a Dewalt 18v that I had from some previous electrical work at a project I volunteered on. With all the conduit being cut, I can't imagine doing this with a hacksaw or tubing cutter. I did use a chopsaw for most of the unistrut cuts (12ga steel), but the portaband could have just as easily been used.
• Klein Tools Power Conduit Reamer -- you can use a step drill to ream the inside of the pipe, but this is faster/easier/cleaner and also reams the outside of the conduit
• Obviously benders for 1/2, 3/4, and 1" conduit. I bought these on eBay, but if I had gone to auctions ahead of time (see notes above), I would have gotten these cheaper. Of course I bought more at the auction anyway so now I have duplicates :|
• Wago Lever Nuts -- not a tool, but SUPER happy I made the decision to use these instead of wire nuts on this project. Especially in the wireway, which is by-design more likely to have branch circuits reworked/modified over time - these made the project much more enjoyable. I still use wirenuts in some places, but in the wireway I like the positive connection from the wirenuts. When I am pulling new conductors into the wireway, I don't need to worry about wirenuts being more likely to come loose as they get bumped/wiggled over time. I bought these in retail boxes online at first, but eventually bought them in some higher quantities from eBay sellers that were portioning out of wholesale lots in generic packaging.
• The wireway - also not a tool, but in hindsight I can only see how poor the outcome would have been if I had put conduit in. Even if I had pre-run 1" conduit around the whole room and put junction boxes every 4'... it would have been a poor facsimile of the outcome I ended up with. Even 1" condui would have been full enough of conductors that it would have probably violated NEC fill, needed to be heavily derated, and would have been downright unpleasant to fish new conductors through for additional/modified branch circuits.
• For the GFCI quad boxes, I definitely would have used GFCI breakers instead, for a cleaner result.

If you see anything that warrants further explanation or details being added to make this more helpful to people brainstorming or planning their own work, please do ask! I will reply and also edit the detail into the appropriate place above.

Another post may follow at some point, about the other subpanel I put elsewhere in the building (for resistive loads including computer/network hardware, a small on-demand hot water heater, etc) and a lot of previous owners' work that I was able to refactor more cleanly to use that panel.

 

[ConValSam]

Looks fantastic!

You'll be very happy to have wire way to add circuits or change conductor size with ease.

Are you an electrician? If not you have done very professional work.

 

[FliesLikeABrick]

Looks fantastic!

You'll be very happy to have wire way to add circuits or change conductor size with ease.

Are you an electrician? If not you have done very professional work.

Thank you - I am not an electrician, but when I lived in Chicago I volunteered for a few years at a community center as one of two maintenance people for the large building. My partner there was a tradesperson who did a lot of commercial electrical work, and I learned a lot from them.

It used to be a public school, 2 stories/36 classrooms, gym, cafeteria, kitchen, offices, etc (roughly 1/6 city block) before being shut down (and neglected for a few years before that). A charitable organization bought it to offer local services, and we had to make a lot of repairs and small changes to help meet those goals.

Lots of plumbing, HVAC, and mechanical repairs; plus installing probably a thousand feet of conduit inside and outside for low voltage networking (wireless networking, security cameras, etc), lighting improvements, and the occasional "we need an outlet over there" kind of changes.

 

[SLK001]

The drop from the attic to the sub panel should be in conduit.

 

[FliesLikeABrick]

The drop from the attic to the sub panel should be in conduit.

Thanks for the feedback. I am guessing you are referring to the NEC provision on protecting feeders from physical damage?

230.50 Protection of Open Conductors and Cables Against Damage ? Above Ground
Service-entrance conductors installed above ground shall be protected against physical damage as specified in 230.50(A) or (B).
(A) Service Cables Service cables, where subject to physical damage, shall be protected by any of the following:
(1) Rigid metal conduit
(2) Intermediate metal conduit
(3) Schedule 80 rigid nonmetallic conduit
(4) Electrical metallic tubing
(5) Other approved means

I had considered this, but reached the conclusion that "where subject to physical damage" likely does not apply here based on height above ground, being indoors, not being immediately adjacent to the door, etc.

I'll look at this again, thanks. Schedule 40 PVC looks to be permitted for protection when used indoors, so I may pull the feed from the panel and reinstall in PVC to protect it at least 8ft up the wall.

The other place I did add protection was in the attic, where the feeder is attached to the side of the walkway nearest the attic access - since that could be kicked or hit with material.

 

[Boswell]

You had me at "56-pics". I love the use of the wireway, it give you a versatility that will come in handy some day.

 

[SLK001]

Thanks for the feedback. I am guessing you are referring to the NEC provision on protecting feeders from physical damage?

Even as high as you have your panel, it will be still be subject to physical damage. A piece of 1" EMT from the panel to a box at the intersection of the attic/workspace is basically all you'll have to do. It will even look more professional.

You also need to support all your EMT down feeds within 36" of the outlet/switch.

 

[rabler]

Are you running the quad GFCI outlets on two circuits in each quad, or alternating circuits? I prefer having two circuits for each quad, but that means they need to be on a common trip.

At this point the panel is getting more populated, with most of the remaining branch circuits for this room pulled in:
- 2x 20A for the GFCI quad boxes