How to Remove a Meter Box from a Burnt Trailer

 

The electric service to the property was attached to the trailer.  Unfortunately, the mobile home is in that awkward stage of too burnt to fix, but not burnt enough to be easy to demolished.  So we need electricity to run power tools so that we are not trying to tear the building down for the next decade.

Since our budget was demolished by buying the land I have to be frugal and reuse as many building materials from the trailer as possible.

That means we have to begin our electric install by removing a meter box from the side of the trailer.  We will rewire it and replace a meter box on a future power pole.

Removing the Box

We start by using the flimsy aluminum ladder I got from the Doomsday Prepper film crew.  It did not hold my weight very well.  But we were able to remove the shingles and flashing from around the weather head.

Since the trailer is slated to be demolished, there was no worry about the home.  This meant the rood was chopped and slashed until the electric conduit was free.

Next, the clamps holding the conduit to the trailer wads removed.  Then ground wires and other connections to the home were disconnected.

The previous owners scrapped a lot of copper (which is what lead to the trailer being unfit for repair).  This meant there was not a lot to disconnect.

The meter box itself was held on by 3 strong lag bolts.

Those wires were connected inside the meter box by some highly torqued Allen head bolts.  Since I lacked the equipment to remove those bolts the guts of the meter box were removed.  Then I could take out the connectors easier.

Take Pictures

Since I had to reuse the meter box and not just remove it, care was taken to replace the screws back in the holes they were removed from.  I also took a lot of video and pictures so we could go back and see what the original set up looked like.  That meant we could recreate it when we replaced the meter box on the new pole.

Once everything was disconnected, the screws holding the meter box to the trailer were removed.  Then the the box and pole were lowered to the ground.

The conduit was heavy galvanized steel, and it was 12 feet tall.  Therefore, it was not the easiest job for the day.

Make sure you are ready for the weight before you remove that last screw.

Watch the Video

The video below shows most of the process – but since the process of removing a meter box, rewiring it, and eventually replacing a meter box is pretty dynamic sometimes we forgot to set the camera up so we may have missed a couple steps – but we have shown enough that anyone with enough common sense to be able to safely remove a meter box should easily get the idea.

As you can see from the above video, removing a meter box is not hard, but the next part of setting the new power pole was a little harder and took some tools.