Welcome to the electrical phase of your pool build. In this stage, it's all about making sure that your pool is powered properly. Before work begins, confirm with your contractor and make sure that they were gonna be providing all breakers, conduit, and materials for this phase of the project. If you are providing some or all of these items, make sure that they're present the day before your subcontractor shows up. Coordinate the conduit runs with your plumbing and gas line. This prevents conflicts and keeps everything clean and efficient. We said this in our last video but it bears repeating. Bonding and grounding is critical. So check with your local jurisdiction to see what their requirements are and make sure that the right person, either your plumber or electrician, is handling the bonding and grounding requirements. Again, any metallic component must be bonded. So this includes your equipotential grid, any slides, handrails, diving board jigs, equipment, everything must be bonded properly. Make sure your electrician is following all clearance requirements for any electrical components like pumps or panels. They all must have the adequate space required either by the manufacturer or by your local codes. Before moving to the next phase, check all circuits and connections. Make sure they're functioning properly before we backfill and cover everything up. It's a really smart idea to label every conduit run so that we can identify it later. And as always, keep your job site as clean as possible. You'll wanna ensure that all of your electrical work passes the inspection prior to moving to gunite. Now don't forget to download your checklist and check out the FAQ after this video. But before you do, let's join Mike in the field and see electrical day in action. Okay. From the electrical, from the pool equipment, they trench a line that goes over to your house. In this particular case, it happened to go through the crawl space, and typically it would come up and tie into your existing electrical panel. Now all panels look different. Most of them are about half this size, but regardless of the size of the panel, they're gonna have the conduit come up, go through this little junction box, and go into your pool your panel itself, and that's how they're gonna pull the wire from here at the panel that goes over to your pool equipment. Alright. We're talking about the electrical today. This is the main panel that, comes up from the house feed up into here. This panel is also, in this case, gonna be the fifty amp breaker panel for the heat pump. So you can see one of the lines comes out here and goes over to the heat pump. A heat pump requires its own fifty amp breaker, so that's gonna be run through this panel here. Also, once it runs through there, it comes out here through what they call an l b that comes over and feeds the main pool panel. Now, this panel is a lot bigger than most just because the amount of pumps that are going on. We have a heater, we have a UVO system, a salt system, and of course four different pumps. So this is a lot bigger than what you'll probably have at your house. Most will probably be about half the size, but the power will go into here, and then from inside of here is where all your breakers are that'll control all the different components. From here, you're gonna see the main line come down. Now in this case, I don't know if you can see from there, but there's a junction box down here that everything kinda runs to, and from there feeds out to all the different pumps, and all the electrical goes through, obviously, all those conduits. They use flex line for feeding all of the pumps so that you'll notice you'll have rigid line that comes up to the panel, but from the panel over to the different components, those are all flex lines that they run through there. They clamp down and you're gonna see different sizes depending on the size wire that they're using. But all the power comes up inside this panel, and this is where the breakers are that handle the different pumps that are out there. So you'll have, you know, your pool and spa pump, booster pump, booster pump, heater, lights, things like that. They will eventually label all of these once they're done with the electrical, and it also has this one being having a remote control. It has a touch screen in here as well, so in case you don't have your phone with you and you're out here at the pool equipment area and you want to turn the pumps on or off for filtering or cleaning the pool or cleaning the filter, you can manually turn it on and off here as well from this little touch screen that they have. This one again is a little bigger than some, but I just wanted to show you what the breakers look like that are for the pool itself. Okay. Here we have the separate fifty amp panel that is just for the heat pump. Heat pumps do require their own separate fifty amp panel that's being fed from the house. Right alongside is the regular pool panel, that handles all the functions for the pool. This one is just for the heat pump. It comes over, comes up, goes into the heat pump. The heat pump here is sitting on a precast pad. These precast pads are pretty typical to be used not only for a heat pump, but for all your pool equipment to be sitting on. Most plumbers do not pour a pad. They'll just bring out a precast concrete pad to sit everything on. You can see here they have the bonding wire that comes up over here. It needs to be attached to the heat pump itself, but they have got that already ran over here, it'll be easy to hook it up. Alright. We talked earlier about the junction box over here that all the power goes to. From there, it goes out to the different components. It also has a line, a flex line that comes out, comes around and comes up here and that feeds the power to the transformer. This is the transformer for your LED lights because they are low voltage, so you don't have any, high power going to pool anymore. We use LED lights, and this is the transformer that powers them. So you're gonna have the feed that goes up into the transformer from the transformer over to the j boxes here. I'll try to move out of your way so you can see those. And what the j box is is a junction box, and it the reason they're up so high is they have to be higher than the water level of the pool because there is water inside of these conduits all the time. So they wanna make sure that they're up high enough so they're higher than the water level of the pool or spa so that that way that water never comes up and hits the electrical connection. So this particular job, yours will probably have just one. This has multiple lights so that you see three different junction boxes. Usually, they'll run all of the conduits up to one junction box, and then from there over to the transformer, and from the transformer over to the power center. But in this case, they have three separate ones. On the back of these j boxes, you can see this copper bonding wire. Any metal component, whether there's metal in the fixture itself or the pumps, any boxes, they all have the copper bonding wire. When I say copper bonding wire, it's a number eight grade copper wire that's exposed that's gonna go around and bond everything together. So you can see it comes down here, goes across, comes over, comes up, it bonds the transformer, and like I said, all the different other components out here that all have any kind of metal in them are all bonded with that number eight copper bonding wire. And that's tied to the bonding of the pool that we talked about earlier when they did the steel. They have the bonding whips coming off. This is another part of that that comes out and attaches all the electrical components. Anything that has metal in it all has to be bonded with that number eight copper bonding wire. They've installed the automatic valve here. This is the way your valve would look standard. But if you have a remote control system, you'll be touching a button on your phone and rotating the valves from pool to spa and back, and that's all done through this actuator motor here. You can also see where they installed the temperature flow sensor back here, and that's gonna be able to tell your remote control system that water is flowing and also the temperature. There's another temperature sensor at the heater, so this kinda gets the ingoing, if you will, and over at the heater, it'll get the outgoing temperatures. Temperatures. For bonding around the pool, they call that equipotential grid that goes around the pool for bonding. We talked in the previous videos about how the steel has, at least four copper bonding whips as we call them that's attached to the steel grid and stick out from the pool. What we're gonna do is attach those whips to the copper bonding wire. This is a number eight copper bonding wire. It goes all the way around the pool and it attaches at those at least four points with these what they call split bolts and, you just screw these together, keep it nice and tight, and you're gonna, like I said, have four at least four of those around the pool and the number eight bonding wire going all the way around the pool, and that's what they call an equipotential grounding. And most of your jurisdictions are gonna require something that looks pretty similar to this. Okay. This is showing a quick little mock up of what a steel grid looks like around the pool. So, some areas are gonna require a steel grid as opposed to the bonding wire going around the edge. It's gonna be no more than three feet from the pool's edge and twelve inch by twelve inch squares going around. And it's gonna attach to those whips, those four whips that we have around the pool for minimum. They're gonna attach to the steel grid with these grounding clamps. And, like I said, this is just a quick mock up, but just to give you an idea of what that kind of would look like, it does need to be elevated up off the ground. And as always, when just like when the pool, we ever tie steel, we always wanna make sure that the tie wires are always pushed down and not poking up so that they're not sticking up into the decking. So just wherever they tie that steel, make sure you're pushing down those wire clamps everywhere so that that way they don't stick up. And like I say, quick mock up, but just to give you an idea what it looks like if your particular jurisdiction does need the steel grid. Here we are on the backside of the scupper fountains, and I wanted to show you how, because they're metal, they need to be bonded just like anything else that's metal around the pool. So there's a little clamp on the back of each one of these that has the bond wire going to it, comes down and hooks up to the bonding wire, the halo as some people call it, that goes all around the pool, and it's grounded with this direct burial split nut grounding lug. And then that comes up to each one of these, has its own separate independent wire, so that that way it's all grounded as part of the whole equipotential grounding grid that goes around the entire pool. Alright. Talking about the equipotential bonding, here we have the number eight bonding wire that goes around the whole pool, what some people call the halo. It needs to be within three feet of water's edge. Now in this particular area, it happens to be in a step down barred area. But what I wanted to show you is how it needs to get hidden, so obviously you don't see it. And the way you do that is you tuck it back behind, like here it comes down and goes behind, these porcelain pavers. And you can see it here peeking out, being in between the wall and the pool shell itself. This will all get tucked in so when they put these on here, you won't actually see it anymore, but it's there for the grounding purposes. Over here, they're gonna be putting pavers on top of it, so that'll obviously hide it, but it's still there to meet the code and to keep everything safe and bonded and grounded. Okay. Pro tip for electrical time. Ask your electrician to put in any extra outlets that you may need. They're gonna have to have a waterproof cover like this that you just open up to be able to use the outlet, so that way it's safe outside and it's GFCI protected. But while your electrician's out there, it's a lot cheaper at that time to have them come out and put in any extra outlets that you think you may need somewhere else throughout the yard. They should be putting one at the pool equipment anyways, but this would be a great time to have them add an extra outlet if you think you might need one somewhere else. Alright. Pro tip when it comes to the masonry work. If your project has any steps in it, you should talk to your mason about possibly putting in some step lights. There's all different step lights available. You probably want to use something that's low voltage. That way it's much easier. It can come on every night. There's no electrical really wiring needed. You just use direct burial cable, and it goes on every night with time clock and uses very little power. That way your steps are always lit up. It makes it a lot safer. So just go over with your mason. There's various styles. Some people will do it on every step, some people do it every other step, but it's something for you to have a conversation with with your mason.