Basics of electrical conduit

Quite often a conduit run consists of a straight stub between boxes. To simplify the installation, you can postpone tying down one of the boxes until after the pipe is terminated. Another common, simple job involves running pipe from a box to an interior corner, known in the trade as a brick wall, where a conduit bend is needed. You can leave one or both legs long, then mark and cut them to fit after the bend is made. Alternately, and more elegantly, use the standard deduction for a given size conduit. For half-inch conduit, the deduction is five inches. For 0.75-in. conduit, the deduction is six inches. For IMC Electrical Conduit the deduction is eight inches. Usually the deduction is stamped on the bender.

Mark the conduit, minus the deduction for the conduit size. Put the conduit in the bender with the mark on the Rigid Electrical Conduit aligned with a mark on the bender, usually an arrow called the B mark.

Make the bend, being sure to bring the moving leg up until it is vertical.

These are the simpler conduit bends. Now we’ll look at some more complex procedures.

An array of pipe can be run from entrance panel to final destination without regard to appearance and it will probably work electrically, but the product would invariably be perceived as substandard. When a group of conduits emerge from the top, side or bottom of a panel, uniform spacing should be maintained as they follow parallel paths from room to room.

A plywood template is helpful in maintaining Flexible Metal Conduit spacing from start to finish.

Where a pipe peels off to one side to connect to a load, it should have previously been located so as to be at the outside of the pack, as opposed to moving to a different level and crossing over. This involves ordering the branch circuits and feeders correctly where they originate at the service equipment and also at each enclosure along the way.

When a number of parallel conduit runs are required to make a 90° (or some other angle) bend simultaneously, multi-shot bends are used to maintain uniform spacing throughout the bend. It is sometimes acceptable simply to bend them at the same angle, but the multi-shot procedure makes for a better finish appearance, especially in an upscale location such as across the ceiling in an airline terminal.

To figure Flexible Metal Conduit Fittings for complex installations, it is often best to use trigonometric functions. The sides of all right triangles with given angles on either side of the hypotenuse conform to the same ratios regardless of the triangle size. These ratios can be found in readily available trig tables. And they can be used to find the sides, or working in the other direction, to find the angles.

In similar triangles, the ratios of the sides are the same regardless of the size of the triangles, and they depend upon the angles. So a triangle with hypotenuse of unit size has opposite side of size sin θ and adjacent side of size cos θ in units of the hypotenuse.

These ratios are useful in finding the angle of a proposed bend when the two sides are known, or finding a side when the other side and the angle are known. The trig tables are embedded in scientific hand calculators, making the number crunching very easy and instantaneous.