I thought this was my thread at first when I saw it. Here is the one that I did last year if you have an hour or two and are interested.
I thought I would start a thread on a garage build we are starting. It is somewhat related. Stall #3 will be where the motorcycles will live. It will be mainly for parking our daily drivers but have room to make it a little bit of a shop. Before the make it bigger comments start. We already have...
www.greentractortalk.com
The biggest bit of advice I got, I think from here was we started with three 9x9 doors. Someone I think here convinced me to make one of the doors 10' wide. There was a lot of talk about increasing all the doors and I would regret not having a 12' door but this is primarily parking not really a work shop. I have stuff for doing smaller projects on motorcycles but I have a shop in a 30x40 pole barn with a 12x12 door that is also insulated and heated which sits about 15' from the new garage that was built. So that impacted some of my decisions.
I would highly recommend taking a look at this thread and maybe post your plans for a recommendation on lighting.
Light Fixture Layout Collections Lighting & Electrical
www.garagejournal.com
In my case 30x40 is a somewhat regular size and I found someone else that had built the same size garage so I just used their layout. The one thing that people first say when they walk in my garage at night for the first time is... "Wow this lighting is amazing!!!!" There are no shadows anywhere and there is plenty of light to do anything anywhere in the garage.
A buddy of mine is building a pole barn in front of his house and had a similar issue to you. He lives out in the country and had buried power coming down the front yard. He had his own transformer. The problem is that the transformer was right where he wanted to put the pole barn. He wanted to have a single meter on the pole barn but the power had to move before the pole barn could be built and he was stumped. What I told him to do is sink some 6x6 posts in the ground where his outside wall will be on the backside of the pole barn. Slap some plywood or regular wood between the posts and mount a meter and a NEMA (outdoor) rated 400A panel. Well it is a panel with two 200A breakers on it they moved his power to that then he will build the pole barn along side of that. His house is powered off that meter/panel. So he only moved the power once last summer and once the meter was moved and power in place it was easier to deal with just the electrician and building inspector rather than trying to get the electric company coordinated as well for a bunch of moves. It might not work in your area but nearly every farm in our area are wired this way.
Since you are trenching to the house, run lots of additional Conduit/PEX runs. I have additional detached buildings but for instance between my shop in the pole barn and the new garage there are three 3/4" PEX runs (water, fiber optic network and compressed air). The compressed air is so I can leave my big 60 gallon tank in the pole barn where I normally use it but I can have drop lines in the parking garage for airing up tires and other light work and not have to listen to a compressor. The PEX I used is rated to 200PSI. These PEX runs are in addition to two 2" conduit runs and a big insulated pair of 1" PEX which is used for hot water for the heating system. PEX and Conduit are cheap to run and you will be thankful to have extra in a trench or dig a couple parallel trenches later down the road. I know the inspector and the contractor would shake their heads when they saw it all but when I explained what it was for they asked how long have I been planning this because they would have never thought to do this.
Having unfinished walls was my plan as well. I told the contractor just do the mins for electrical which is pretty much one outlet per garage door. Well that turned into 50 double boxes and 100 recepticles. The reason was we were delayed and it was running into Oct. I was going to insulate and sheetrock the walls myself other than the firewall that was needed for code. Well because I didn't have time and it was getting cold when they were sheetrocking, I said the heck with it and we did the rest of the wiring really quick and sealed up everything.
Another tip, not sure what openers you are going with. We did jackshaft openers. Three Liftmaster 8500W openers. Because they need power up in the corner of the garage door we put outlets there but I also put outlets in the ceiling where a traditional opener would go. Now if I want to go with a different opener it isn't a big deal as the power is there. I put in 3 ceiling fan boxes. Why not. I only have 1 fan in there now but it is easy to add more if needed. I forget some of the numbers we we went through something like 1200' of 12gauge wiring. The contractor did comment that we have more wiring in the garage than some houses he has built. But it is done. Well kind of is a garage ever really done?
