Wiring up a pergola

[Hmbre97]

Sometime in the next few weeks, I'm expanding my patio out (concrete) and will be putting up a 10' x 12' free standing pergola. I'm not sure how I should be going about trying to light this thing since it won't be attached to my house. It will be about 4' from the house total. I've attached a crude drawing of roughly how the backyard will be set up. Right now, all I have is a single outside porch light with a single switch inside the back door. What I would really like is to have that inside switch control both the porch light and the pergola lighting. Would there be a way to have the wiring come out at the corner of the house, run underground next to the slab, then come back up and hook up at the post on the pergola? The back of my house is hardiplank and the sides are brick.

[STANGGT40]

sure, there are several ways that you can do it. i usually don't like to use direct burial uf cable, but you can easily use it, in this instance, if you don't want to run conduit. you can stub conduit up from the dirt, if there is no way to hide it inside the pergola or your exterior wall. you'll get what's called an "LB", where the conduit penetrates the wall. what i would probably do is the following (to make it look a little less like it was an afterthought)

(this is assuming that you want to use the same switch and not add another)

take the switch out of the wall, fish the nm cable down the wall, through the switch box, and exit on the outside of the wall (about 15-20 inches off of the ground) and set a bell-box out there with a gfci receptacle in it. (you'll obviously have to drill a hole in your exterior wall, to access the cable and pull it through.) either run conduit from that box, down, underground, and to your pergola or stub conduit down and run uf cable (direct burial) to your pergola.

now, if you do the above, you could pull a 12/3 nm cable from the switch location to the gfci, so you can have a constant hot at the gfci and a switched hot for the pergola...or you can just run a 12/2, so the gfci will be switched with the pergola/patio light...whichever you prefer.

now, this is obviously without seeing the surroundings...there may be obstacles that i'm not aware of, but if not, that should work for you.

[juiceweezl]

Don't know if you have gas or not at your house, but here's another thought. You may want to bury pipe in the slab and stub it off somewhere in case you ever want to add an outdoor gas fireplace. When I did mine, I ran gas to where my grill was going but not to an area where I had a firepit. I won't make that mistake again.

Also, you may want to bury some PVC to run water somewhere as well. It's cheap and easy.

[Hmbre97]

sure, there are several ways that you can do it. i usually don't like to use direct burial uf cable, but you can easily use it, in this instance, if you don't want to run conduit. you can stub conduit up from the dirt, if there is no way to hide it inside the pergola or your exterior wall. you'll get what's called an "LB", where the conduit penetrates the wall. what i would probably do is the following (to make it look a little less like it was an afterthought)

(this is assuming that you want to use the same switch and not add another)

take the switch out of the wall, fish the nm cable down the wall, through the switch box, and exit on the outside of the wall (about 15-20 inches off of the ground) and set a bell-box out there with a gfci receptacle in it. (you'll obviously have to drill a hole in your exterior wall, to access the cable and pull it through.) either run conduit from that box, down, underground, and to your pergola or stub conduit down and run uf cable (direct burial) to your pergola.

now, if you do the above, you could pull a 12/3 nm cable from the switch location to the gfci, so you can have a constant hot at the gfci and a switched hot for the pergola...or you can just run a 12/2, so the gfci will be switched with the pergola/patio light...whichever you prefer.

now, this is obviously without seeing the surroundings...there may be obstacles that i'm not aware of, but if not, that should work for you.

This is looking like my best bet right now. Half of that concrete is existing so I can't run it directly from the house to the ground but I'm thinking if it came out on the corner of the house, I could bend some EMT to exit just off the edge of the slab and bury it. Then have it come back up next to the pergola. I don't want to run any electrical under the new section of slab as I suspect this pergola will probably be a temp thing (like 2-3 years).