Electrical, Lighting and Venting

It’s been a while since my last update, but significant progress has been made. Since Thanksgiving, I have made progress on electrical installation including all of the circuits and outlets for the facility, as well as lighting.

Lozwott has 5 electrical circuits:

One 15 AMP circuit for all LED based lighting

One 15 AMP circuit for Computers and Telescope Electronics

One 15 AMP circuit for general use outlets

One 15 AMP for the A/C unit in the control room

One 20 AMP circuit for the roof motor

Installation of the different circuit legs using Romex 14-2 or Romex 12-2 was pretty straight forward. I made use of push connectors (as opposed to wire nuts) as much as possible. I believe that these provide more secure connections than could otherwise be made with standard wire nuts.

The control room interior lights are Juno 4 inch can lights. The telescope area lighting are Patriot Marine lights from Menards. I used Feit red LED bulbs for lighting, and Legrand dimmer switches for both the control room can lights and the telescope area lights.

Externally I used Lithonia 2160 Lumens bright white flood lights facing north and west. This gives a significant amount of illumination for late night treks back to the house.

Here are some pics:

At the suggestion of my neighbor, Dave I installed 2 vents in the telescope area to allow for ventilation in case of moisture build up. These are essentially soffit vents on the outside, and closable louvered vents on the inside. Hopefully between the vented ridgetop on the roof, and these vents on the lower part of the building we can get enough circulation – here are some pics: