Electrical

Electrical can be one of the most intimidating aspects of a build. And for good reason! If done incorrectly, it can cause serious injury, damage or death. Since I’ve never done electrical work, I’m not going to pretend like I do and start teaching others how it’s done. For most of our electrical work, I hired an electrician with experience wiring up tiny houses over at Tiny Innovations. Luckily, he didn’t mind me following along and asking him every question I could think of. Most of the prep work is actually not dangerous and can be done with limited experience. If you’ve never done any electrical work before, consult with a professional.
There are presumably two options when it comes to how to access electricity for a yurt. The first option is to tap into existing electrical or power from the city’s grid. The second option is to use solar power. Our budget this time around didn’t allow for the use of solar and we had access to existing power from an RV hookup that we could tap into. Easy enough!

The location of the power is located approximately 100ft away directly through a patch of blackberry bushes. Those bushes were partially cleared with a chainsaw. Any permanent electrical lines will need to be run underground through the conduit. That conduit sits in a trench that is later backfilled. Our particular building code wanted the conduit to be 18” below the surface and another 6” if water would be laid in the same trench. This was a job for a gas-powered trencher. Once dug we could lay schedule 40 conduit in, using PVC glue to create a waterproof bond between each section of PVC. Elbows were installed on each end with conduit running vertical attaching to the RV power box on one end and up through the platform into a wall in the yurt.

Inside the yurt, you’ll install a subpanel box in between two studs of your wall. Make sure you buy one with enough slots for the breakers you’ll need. Since we will only be using 30 amps, we only need three breakers. 15 amp circuit for the water heater, 15 amp circuit for the lights and 20 amp circuit for the outlets, all 120 volt.

An electrician will be able to do the math to determine what gauge wire you’ll need for your situation. The gauge is determined by the length of the run and how much power you are wanted to draw at the endpoint. For our 30 amps at the end of 100ft conduit, we required #8 wire. The next step would be to run a conduit snake through. A DIY version of this is a string tied to a paper clip. Put a shop vac on one end of the conduit to suck the string all the way through. Tied one end of the string to our wire and pulled it all the way through. Worked like a charm.
The last step is to take these wires and connect the hot, ground and neutral to the appropriate bus bars in your subpanel.

Those blue plastic boxes you see in walls? Those are for outlets and switches. Super simple to install. Measure at what height you want your various electrical fixtures and nail the boxes to the appropriate stud. Try to keep outlets at similar heights. Same for light switches.

Romex cable is actually just a sleeve that houses multiple wires inside. For a simple job, you’ll have your hot, neutral and ground wire. This cable will start from a breaker (which is connected to the appropriate bus bar in your subpanel) and will go to each appropriate electrical fixture. You’ll be able to daisy chain one off of the other until they are all connected.

Modern outlets and switches are very simple to install on your own now. You’ll attach each wire from your Romex to the appropriate spot on the outlet or switch. Most of the time they are different colored screws that the individual instructions describe. Your switches and dimmers will be connected to the relevant light housings in your ceilings or walls.

If everything was installed correctly, you start flipping on your breakers. Start with the source breaker and progressively turn on the breakers in your subpanel, testing in between. Do not turn on the breaker for your water heater if it is not filled with water. That’s it! Turn a light on. Charge your phone. Plug in your novelty singing big mouth bass.