So I have a stilited house. The floor sealed with spray foam Insulation, and sealed with hardiplank. At the meter, I have a disconnect after it, then goes into the house. I am wanting to run 3 basic outlets for small draw, and one outlet for a 110v plug and play hot tub I have downstairs. It would be a pain to run new wire from upstairs in the house, and feed it downstairs somehow. My question is, could I tie into the disconnect I have downstairs, and put another panel next to it so I can run new servises for downstairs?
That is called a feeder tap and it is legal, the actual connection would depend on what is available in that disconnect enclosure but you might end up having to put a junction box in then a sub panel for your loads. I would seriously think about wiring your hot tub for 240. Most will go either way. A 60 amp sub panel might actually be plenty for a few outlets and the tub but a 100 is about the same price. The only way to know for sure is to do a load calc to see what you can get away with on your service. The hot tub I put in bumped my service requirement up although I doubt I ever actually use that much power. You have 200 so you are probably going to be OK.
I can't answer your electrical question, but is your house a stilted house? Is that because of expected flooding? I notice that the house across the street is not. I don't understand that. Are your neighbors stupid?
Long ago, 1968, I drove around the flat area several miles south of New Orleans, a very flat area I'm pretty sure flooded at least once a year, and some houses were on stilts, but others, not old ones either, pretty new, were on the ground. Why would they do that?
Some houses are Pre-FIRM and were not regulated by FEMA. The current rate maps are somewhat draconian and in some places might represent a required 200-300 year flood elevation.
OTOH there are other places where nobody thinks of a flood, mortgage lenders do not require it but you can get flooded. My sister had one of those houses in Maryland.
Agree with the hot tub advice. The difference is that 120V ones, AFAIK, the heater will not run the same time as the pump, so whatever temp you have it when you get in, it's downhill from there. Also, the heater is
1/4 the power of the 240V heater, so it takes a very long time to heat. Not so bad if it's an indoor one and you want to keep it fully heated all the time. But if you want to keep it at a lower temp to save money and then raise it an hour or two before use, you can't raise it more than a couple degrees in that timeframe with 120V. Most have timers too, so you could set it to raise when you want, but overall, 240V is the way to go, especially if you have to run a circuit anyway.
Just for a reference point I have an 8 foot tub with an 11KW heater (bigger heater than most if not all package units) and I get about 10 degrees an hour delta with the tub covered. Hot Springs brags that their 8' tub has a 4kw heater and it is 1kw at
120v. Even assuming they have a better cover, that is still ~4 degrees an hour at 240v and ~1 degree an hour at 120.
We call them piling houses here but the objective is the same, to get the finished floor of the living space above the FEMA plane. Most people end up enclosing the lower level, usually illegally but there won't be any flood insurance there so don't put anything there that can't get wet. Also be sure the walls will blow out before the structure is damaged if there is a flood or they might void your flood coverage.
It's been over 50 years, but my recollection is that the houses not on stilts were not 2-story houses that really weree on stilts but the bottom was enclosed. My recollection is that they were one-story houses, probably with a pitched roof and an attic.
I once tried to use google street view to look at what is there 50 years later, but I'm not sure where I was, I looked again, in Cutofff, where all the houses I saw were on the ground, and then at
517 Jackson St. Lafitte, Lousiana And on that little street there are a half-dozen big houses on stilts, and one house on each side of the street that is not. The one on the left is harder to see, and google doesn't go farther down the street, but the one on the right is easy sto see, tan stone or tan brick, attic that's too low to be usable for living space, and it looks very new. Brown roof, perfect white edge (gutters?) to the roof. And there is a white pickup truck in front of it.
Fruther down the road in the distance is another big house on stilts and probably on the left another one not.
I'd give the url but I'm looking on another computer.
So what's wrong with these two or three bulders that they built a ranch house right ont he ground. Doesn't Lafitte flood every year or 5 for certain. A quick google of Lafitte flooding found examples of it flooding.
My bet is they are PreFIRM houses, not new ones although Louisiana seems to get away with a lot more from FEMA than we do. If a house here is more than 50% damaged or you just want to put on an addition that raises the value or costs more than 50%, it needs to meet FEMA height. That is building assessed value, not market price or land value so most PreFIRM houses can't even be improved. It won't get through permitting. We had a guy here pay $460k for a house but the county decided the building was only worth about $80k so any improvements he wanted to make were limited to $40k. Faced with that, he tore down the house, trucked in about 6 feet of dirt and built a new house. Another neighbor paid to have his house raised 5 feet, then started his remodel from there. I went another way. As owner builder, I did mine in increments, none being more than about $20k on the permit at a time and that pretty much only included materials that I got wholesale because my wife was a builder at the time.
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