My house was built in 1928, so unsurprisingly I’m not overly endowed with exterior outlets. I do have some on my new garage, but I was considering building a simple fountain on the other side of the house. (Homemade and a billion tons of concrete, if you’re reading my other thread on “how to keep people from stealing my shit”.) Can it be done by battery? If not, how do people do it? They always gloss over that part on TV and in Family Handyman.
You can use Solar to power it. It’s unlikely to be cheap, however.
The best way to do it is to run a trench to the house and install a dedicated circuit for the fountain. An electrician would have to get involved at some point, but you could do most of the heavy lifting.
Yes, but then you soon face the question of how to charge that battery.
Unless the fountain is a long way from the house, Finagle’s suggestion makes the most sense.
Certain wire is rated for direct burial with no housing (you must be sure to use an approved type). This isn’t outside what’s possible for a handyman, but consultation with an electrician is highly recommended.
Perhaps a little out of left field here, but I would think about something as simple as running cat5 cable and using a PoE injector. This stuff runs around 50 volts and can safely output 12 or so watts. You can power a little motor that can help keep water moving or create a small jet.
Just dig a trench for the wire and off you go. You can experiment with just using two strands of that wire for a stronger 12v adapter, but Im not sure of how safe that is or how much power is lost as heat because of distance and resistance.
Solar will work too. Thisfountain runs 200 dollars, but doesnt work when the sun doesnt shine. It has no battery. If you want a battery then you can try something like this.
You have a lot of options. For what you would pay the electrician to set up just the power line you could have a solar or PoE fountain.
Well, my dad’s an electrician (although as I’ve said in the other thread he really shouldn’t be doing any electritioning) and anything that looks worth stealing is… a problem.
I haven’t seen your other thread, I assume your dad has a health issue? If you dug the trench and that type of thing your dad wouldn’t need to do a lot of work. He would need to size the wire for the correct voltage drop depending on the length of the run and then tie it in to the panel. You could do any drilling and laying the wire, etc. yourself and have him basically supervise.
I just did a Google search and found some fountain pumps that run off of 12 volts, so I would think you could use the sort of wiring meant for 12V garden lights. I know that sort of thing doesn’t need to be buried very deep and is designed for installation by the average homeowner.
Finagle has the right idea if you are using a 120V pump. I have run outlets out into my yard in a couple of locations. Just have to check the local codes for burying cable. I use conduit and exterior 2/14 cable and buried the conduit >12 inches below grade. I know that this is over-engineered, but it exceeds NEC requirements. Tapping into the breaker panel isn’t hard, but if you don’t know what you are doing, then have an electrician do it. My fountain that I installed in my last house had a plug-in style pump, so I installed a GFCI in an exterior covered housing for this.
HTH
V
If you really don’t want to have to deal with running electrical cable out there, I suppose you could always try the Roman technique.