Today I finished with the install of two new circuits in our rental house. "Rental house?" you might ask. Yes, normally I wouldn't go to such effort to improve a rental... but there was a slight problem that I didn't want to subject the tv/stereo to: overloaded circuit. One circuit was running: the refrigerator, every light in the whole house (including outside lights), every outlet in the living room (including our wine fridge). So I decided that dropping in a couple circuits wouldn't be such a bad idea. So I scoped it out. It was clear that running the wire under the house was the way to go (vs. attic). At a minimum I wanted to put in a proper dedicated circuit for the refrigerator to meet current code (because who wants their fridge to get tripped because someone was running a hairdryer in the other room? not so good for the compressor).

As it happened, the TV in the living room was only a few feet away from the fridge. I need a grounded outlet there to plug a power strip in to run the TV. So, what the heck... I might as well run another circuit for that. If it would've been easy I would've rewired the whole room to be on that circuit... but, this is a rental afterall. The solution, add a 2nd outlet right behind the TV. Two outlets next to each other... ok, it looks a little silly, but, it's a rental. Running a 2 wires isn't really much harder than running 1. So that was the plan.

A few things helped the process. The breaker box is ancient. I found used breakers on ebay from electricians who had done box upgrades. There was already a conduit from the box running under the house, which happened to have just enough space for 6 wires (i.e. 2 by 12-2). There was already something sticking up through the floor near the walls where I needed to drill into to run the new wire, so I had a point of reference to find the walls from under the house: water line for the fridge, coax for the TV.

I did need to buy a longer drill bit in one case because there were two 2x6 floor joist was in the way. Otherwise, project costs were 60 feet of 12/2, two circuit breakers, a couple gang boxes and the outlets/covers which I already had on hand. Less than $50.