I like it; I went diving into electrical stuff a few years ago to add extra circuits but finally realized a subpanel is the “right way”. Definitely mention what things have to go on their own breakers, like air compressors, dust collection, etc. so you don’t trip one when something turns on while using another tool. Also keep the lights separate, and maybe have a dedicated “media” outlet for TV, DVD, computer.

Then think about how many 240V 2-pole circuits you might need later; any possible upgrades like a more powerful lathe, AC or electric radiant heat, or 3 hp table saw.

By the way, loved your recent Lego post! I like giving Legos to my friends’ kids, and I’ve kept all of mine. I just got back from Disneyworld, and went to the Lego store in Downtown Disney. They had an awesome giant dragon made from Legos; I’ll post it on Twitter this afternoon.

Cool! I’m glad to see you’ve got a good electrical set-up. I still remember my one-car garage with the lonely 15A outlet that I had to be careful about using more than one thing at a time. I am putting most of the lights on the subpanel, but I am leaving some on the house panel for the back-up scenario you talk about so that I can lock it out.

I kept my bus tie just in case I ever wanted to have a separate service or something like that; not sure what Southern California Edison would say about whether that’s allowed. But bill separation is a really good point. I could put that $ on the LLC and then prove it.

I rewired my shop with a subpanel a couple years ago and put only the wall outlets (tool circuits) on the panel. The lights and overhead door are still on the original circuit from the house panel. That way I can shut off all the tool circuits and lock the panel to keep the kiddos from firing up the tools. Also if I happen to overwhelm the 40A 240 in the subpanel the lights won’t shut off. My panels are further apart than yours but it’s very similar to what you did.

Since you have a full size panel you could always get a separate service put into that panel (200A right) and then replace the bus tie and nix the feeder from the main panel. If you ever needed to seperate the bills for the shop and home (for tax purposes) this would be the way to go. We ran two panels at our lake place. One for all the normal circuits in a house and the other panel is for the electric baseboard heaters. We have off-peak rates for that and it’s a cheaper tier of electricity. I’m doubting you could rely on off-peak as your only supply for the shop though.

Thanks! I went from no dust collector to a shop vac to a Jet DC-1100 which I still have. The DC650 is better than nothing of course; it will pick up chips and coarse dust. If you have very small amounts of flex duct connecting directly to the tool you might be getting decent airflow, much better than a shop vac.

The more CFM you get the greater distance you can collect the fine dust; the suction distance drops radically with distance, meaning you need much more CFM the further away you want to draw in dust. For example, alot of organizations such as the ACGIH recommend 400 CFM for table saws, but the reality is you want more than that, at least 800-1000 to be able to grab the fine dust cloud around you. Drum sanders especially. Of course a good blade guard w/ a dust hose is really effective at the table saw, and good hoods at other tools are critical.

Make sure you seal all the connections on the DC-650; I’ve read in some reviews that they’re not sealed completely.

Now if I had the DC-650, I might look at centralizing the collector and radially distributing ductwork to each tool, though that compromises your layout. Permanent ductwork with this gets tricky, because too much (flex plus sheet metal with elbows and fittings = static pressure that reduces CFM significantly). You can also look at getting quick-connect fittings (Rockler has them) to reduce the time it takes to switch from machine to machine.

Or, depending on your basement shop’s layout, you could located the CFM-hungry machines together and use the collector to duct locally to those, and use a shop vac for portable sanders, routers, etc. In fact, I have my T-Saw, Planer, and Jointer in a “work cluster” anyway for ergonmic workflow, so that would be good for reducing ductwork as well.

I had a 1-car garage shop with one wall lined with tools, and a duct running along the floor/ wall that branched to the table saw and router table for only 15 ft. of duct or so, and short branches of only +/- 18″. This helped reduce the static pressure and at least maximized the CFM I was getting.

Karl