{"id":91628,"date":"2025-04-25T10:45:04","date_gmt":"2025-04-25T01:15:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.solarquotes.com.au\/blog\/?p=91628"},"modified":"2025-04-27T10:03:56","modified_gmt":"2025-04-27T00:33:56","slug":"power-data-same-conduit","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.solarquotes.com.au\/blog\/power-data-same-conduit\/","title":{"rendered":"Wiring Wrangles: How Power And Data Make Electricians Bicker"},"content":{"rendered":"

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SolarQuotes recently detailed the fairly difficult installation of a home EV charger<\/a> and sure enough, the electricians turned up in the comments section to start arguing about it.<\/p>\n

Read on while we explain that you don’t always have to put data cable in its own pipe.<\/p>\n

Australian building trades have a bit of a hierarchy, and usually, the crew that preceded you is your natural enemy. Carpenters hate it when the concreters don’t get the slab right. Roofers hate it when the carpenters don’t get the purlins straight.<\/p>\n

Everyone hates plumbers because they put pipes everywhere and refuse to move them.<\/p>\n

But electricians are precious. They’re the smartest of all trades (obviously), yet they’re incapable of operating a broom.<\/p>\n

Electricians are also argumentative pricks who will quote rules, chapter and verse, whenever there’s a possibility that the other trade got it wrong, in their humble opinion.<\/p>\n

We’ve explained before<\/a> that becoming a qualified spark requires a lot of study<\/a>. There are a lot of rules, and to be fair, that’s because other trades don’t deal with something quite so lethal.<\/p>\n

Wiring Needs Protection<\/h2>\n

At its heart, the AS 3000 standards<\/a> are all about protecting wiring.<\/p>\n

Protection from temperature. Protection from overload. Protection from weathering. Protection from animals, including other builders.<\/p>\n

The culmination of all these rules is for the protection of the end user and one of the best and most common ways to protect wiring is to put it inside a pipe referred to as conduit.<\/p>\n

For exceptional protection from forklifts or fuel refinery vapours or Americans,1<\/a><\/sup> galvanised metal pipe is great but difficult to work with.<\/p>\n

In most instances PVC is the conduit of choice, in rigid or flexible, with different grades and colours for different requirements.<\/p>\n

There’s even special conduit for solar applications,<\/a> which we’ve explained before in simply riveting articles<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Choosing Your Route<\/h2>\n

As the video shows<\/a>, we discussed different ways to get a new, compliant electrical supply to a garage in a backyard.<\/p>\n

The cheap cheerful and fast method would be to string up a catanary wire for support, then run UV stabilised black cable<\/a> overhead. Provided it’s over 3 metres from the ground this would be compliant but perhaps not aesthetic.<\/p>\n

With a bad back and an aversion to digging, I would likely have surface mounted a conduit on the building and then used galvanised pipe to run along the fence because I like the look of galvanising. And the neighbours wouldn’t be able to drive a screw through it.<\/p>\n

However, the neatest, tidiest and best protected wires are those run underground.<\/p>\n

Underground Requirements<\/h2>\n

While there are a number of exceptions, like concrete being substituted for a deep trench, the basic requirements for undergrounding electrical wiring include:<\/p>\n