what's up my friends today we are putting in light poles
if you've been kind of keeping track of the videos over the last like four or five months I've gone
through this job showing how we did all the grounding and bonding for a slab how we dug
all the underground and we had to dig for all of the light poles that are getting hung around this
property so today we actually get to wire up the poles and hang them so light poles have to be dug
in place once they get down to depth they get what are called Sono tubes they put basically
a cardboard tube in place and that's going to hold all of the concrete that's going to get poured in
here to be the pole base so pole base is usually stick I don't know three to four feet out of the
ground kind of again depends on what the sight level is and everything and on top of that you
put the pole so the process of how you prep a pole is you put the Sono tube in place then you
build some rebar and put a rebar structure like rings that are all connected inside and that's
going to keep that concrete really really hard so it doesn't start cracking and breaking apart
and then you have to put anchor bolts inside of it and the anchor bolts can be you know 18 24 inches
long usually like a one inch bolt and there's four of them that get put down inside of the
Sono tube and then once that's all in we come and we drive a ground rod either inside of the
pole base or just outside of the pole base and on that note there's a difference between equipment
ground and conductor and a grounding electrode conductor so the ground that I'm talking about
is a bare ground that gets attached to a ground rod that is a grounding electrode conductor
that's not the equipment ground some people are like well why couldn't you just run like a black
and a white you know out to each pole and then just stick a grounder on the ground and then it
would have a ground that's not the same ground when we're talking about a ground we're always
talking about an equipment ground and conductor that comes from a panel somewhere where there's
a breaker so your black white your green need to still go out because those get hooked to
the the actual conductors inside of that Pole the actual grounding electrode conductor is a separate
conductor that is run to specifically a grounding electrode now some people argue oh you don't need
them it's stupid they don't actually do anything some people are like Forum super against them
either way we had an inspector and in our area we do have to ground every single one of them
sometimes they have to go overboard and go crazy with cad welding sometimes they let us just put
a ground clamp on them or an acorn or something like that in our case the inspector wanted us to
CAD weld every single one of these they actually wanted us to put rigid conduit in every one of the
bases as well rather than just putting PVC in so it's a little bit more of a pain and then to not
have to worry about threading all the ends and everything we actually just put junction boxes
outside of the pole bases so all we had to do is just run some wire inside each one of the pole
bases once they're all hung rather than having to try to pull all this wire and everything because
each run goes from pole to pole so we got all of our stuff CAD welded we got all the grounds
put in everything and then all the bases were poured usually the people that are doing the
concrete pouring are the ones that are setting the anchor bolts so in my situation I always make
these concrete companies some templates that way when the anchor bolts are set in place and then
they dump all this concrete the bolts don't get all kicked over I've had a number of times in
the past where they've messed them up so badly that we couldn't even Mount the pole so they had
to drive new anchors in them so to avoid that I always make a square template with a round hole
in the middle and that allows the conduit to go up through that hole and then I make four more
holes exactly precisely where I want those bolts to stick up and then they put that template over
the top of everything after they pour to make sure once it all dries that those things are sticking
as straight up as possible now the other thing we got to understand is as things dry a lot of times
things just cure and settle weird even with a template so you will usually still have to sit and
bang and hammer on those anchors to get them to be straight I usually put a nut over the threads
I don't bang on the threads of the hammer because you end up messing up the thread so I usually put
a nut over the threads and then I take a hammer and I bang them over to where they are straight
next thing we have to do prep each one of the poles they come as just a pole and then they'll
come like a separate palette full of heads because you can match any kind of head on any kind of pole
pretty much so these are specifically LED heads nobody's using high pressure sodium or anything
like that anymore pretty much everybody's using LED now so we fed a whole bunch of THHN you know
black white green in every single one of the poles we got all of the heads attached to the poles made
sure that the wire that we ran up through the poles that we terminated to the heads and then
got them all together as one assembly so that we could lift them up in the air and set them on the
pace already wired and ready to rip so the next thing that I did was I grabbed a telehandler or
a forklift people just call it a forklift so I used a strap that was a 5 000 pound rated strap
these things are probably like weigh 500 pounds you know fully assembled so I have this really
thick strap that I wrapped around him and then I slid my Fork through the strap and lifted them up
and got them really high up in the air and kind of carried them over and set them down and I went a
few inches above the pole before actually setting it down because I had two guys on the ground that
were making sure that the actual bolt pattern was going to match they had to take the ground
wire that we put down in the the base when they were pouring it make sure that that gets stuffed
up there too so when this thing slides down the ground wire is able to stick out of the little
hand hole that comes on all of these poles once we set it down we we just barely set it down make
sure everything's gonna match they might have to adjust the screws and bang on them a little
bit more just to get everything to sit perfectly and for that pulled drop down on those anchors I
very slowly and very care carefully with nobody's fingers in the way lowered that pull down and then
we got it to set on the bottom set of nuts so in this situation there was kind of a funny thing
that happened not actually funny but it's funny now there's actually two sets of nuts and washers
they embedded one set in the concrete so you're supposed to have one set of nuts that are above
the concrete and that's what you twist and you kind of raise them and lower them and that's
what levels your pull then there's another set that goes on top of the plate for the pole and
that's what cinches the the pole down so the top is just to keep him tight so the pole doesn't fall
the ones on the bottom are what we use to level with so I'm gonna have to go buy more nuts now
because he embedded all of those in concrete so always make sure you talk to your concrete guy
before they pour so that they know that so got new nuts got everything set down on the bottom
most of them are like horribly crooked once we got the plate at the bottom of the pole base
on put the top nuts and washers on and then we started tightening them the way I do it is I
always take two levels two magnetic levels I put a level on the side level on the front and that way
it makes sure as you're tightening everything you can kind of see if it's leaning one way or
the other and you just work your way all the way around once you get it level just tighten each one
one at a time and make sure that that thing is not moving anywhere then there's always a plastic set
of Base covers so on these poles you put these little plastic covers so everything is nice and
covered on the bottom and then there's usually a cap that you have to put on the top and then the
next thing that we did was get all of the runs the underground runs between each pole wired
the property is not ready there's not actually power there yet but because this is alongside
such a busy highway the Builder asks like we need to get these on temporary power I want to get a
photocell or something so that this thing is lit up at night because we keep having a problem with
people driving by Steel and stuff so we've got everything wired and ready to go so now we're
waiting for the meter to get set on our t-pole so that we can actually energize everything and get
these lights burning so let me know how you guys do your light poles what kind of equipment you
prefer using what kind of weird things that you've come across and if you want to watch more about
this job specifically I did a video you can click here to watch about the grounding and bonding of
a slab or you can click here if you want to watch a video about whole underground that we
had to spend weeks digging love you crazy people thanks for watching I'll see you in the next one