Our house sits back about 450 feet from the edge of the road where all of the services such
as electric, gas, phone, cable TV, etc are, so we had to get all of those items back to the
house somehow. The simplest way for everything except the gas would be to have telephone poles
about every 150 feet back to the house and have all of the wires strung from them. We weren't
thrilled with the idea of having some telephone poles in our front yard, however, running electric
wire from the road underground would be very expensive, so we compromised by going above ground
half way and underground the rest of the way.
Here are the trenches going towards the pole and the road
The first 200 feet of our lot is only 60 feet wide and provides the access to the rest of our
lot. We were able to have the electric company place their pole 175 feet in from the road and
run overhead wires from the road to the pole. From there we decided that we would go
underground back to the house. The next step was to dig the trenches needed for all of the
services. You can dig the trenches by hand, hire someone to dig them or rent a trencher.
Here are the trenches going toward the house
We choose the last option as it was quicker than doing it by hand, but cheaper than hiring
someone else to do it. The trencher worked very nicely and we were able to dig a trench for the
electric that was 4 feet deep and 6 inches wide. Two trenches for the cable and phone that were
only 18 inches deep and 6 inches wide and finally a trench all the way from the road for the gas
line that was 2 feet deep and 6 inches wide. We were able to dig all of these trenches in about
7 hours. We then laid the phone and gas lines in the trenches we had just created for those two, the
cable and electric companies came the following week and laid their lines in the remaining trenches.
Here is the trencher that we rented.