Take a tour of my Shop Electrical System
Interesting Characteristics
I have quite an extensive electrical system in my shop. There is power everywhere, the walls, floor and ceiling for both 110v and 220v. I wanted to ensure I had plenty of power outlets for all the workstations and also for various power tools so I put outlets spaced about every 4-5ft on the walls around the perimeter of the room. Some are 4ft high just above the wainscot and a few are 2ft off the floor. I also have power on the ceiling. I a spotlight over my bench vise and a retracting extension cord which both use ceiling outlets. My air filtration system hangs directly over an outlet in the center of the room. I have a single 220v outlet in the floor which I use to drive my rip table saw (you can see more of that under the Table Saws page). The whole system is routed through a big red button called a Shunt switch. This is a safety kill switch. It will shut off power to all the machines, but leave all the lights on. I don't even begin to understand how this is all wired electrically, I had a professional electrican do the work. There are two circuit breaker boxes side-by-side. All the shunt-controlled outlets are routed through this second box.
Commentary
I live in the cold Northeast where we experience some pretty nasty winter weather. It's not uncommon for us to lose power for 2-3 days (or longer) multiple times during the winter season. Most people I know have a generator backup in their homes. I have one also. But since I have radiant heat in the shop, which is water running through pipes embedded in the concrete subfloor I wanted to ensure that nothing bad happened in the shop during one of these power hits, so I installed a generator hookup in the shop too. So now when we're hit with one of those extended outages, I can run both my house and shop off my generator (I just have to wheel it back and forth :)
For a detailed walk-thru of individual workstations in my shop, click on any of the links below.