rleete wrote:Nice vise. Must be fun to be so rich.
If it's a residence, chances are you only have 220 single phase. 3 phase will end up costing quite a bit if you have to run lines from the street.
No, it's not a residence. I have a small 4-story office building where I have a set of single stall garages on the far side of the parking lot. Initially these garages were built with the idea of leasing them to tenants but there has never been a whole lot of interest so I have two of the five rented out to someone in the nearby neighborhood and I have the remain three, at the moment. I had leased on of the spaces out to a cell phone company where they had installed some of their receivers/transmitters. For their equipment we had to put in the HVAC system to keep the communications equipment within a certain range of temperatures. The company has since been bought out or folded so I took over that space as my "shop".
I just checked all the motors in the boiler room and they are all 3-phase. Now, I have a panel in the boiler room where there is a 220v single phase breaker that somehow goes through conduit and under the parking lot to the garages. In theory, all that needs to be done is to run some new wire out to the garage. In reality though I am not sure just how practical that would be. I doubt that you could pull another 3-phase wire through the same conduit that the 220v single phase is already in (even if it was allowed by "code"). Possibly one could pull the single phase and replace it with 3-phase but then I would have to separate out the 3-phase back to single phase for the furnace, lights, outlets, garage door openers, etc.
So, even though I have 3-phase on the property, I'm not sure that will get me any closer to a "solution".
-Ron