4 Ways of Bending Conduit

Electrical conduit is used to make routing cables around a room much easier, but bending conduit can provide its very own challenges. There are quite a few different types of electrical conduit, and also different methods of bending it. It's important that you choose the best method to bend the conduit you are using for your electrical wiring project.

Although it is possible to cut the pipe and apply conduit connectors this would be both time consuming and costly. Bending electrical conduit will not only save you time but also money too. Bending electrical conduit around your house may appear difficult it's actually much easier than routing metal armored cable around your home.

Bending thin walled metal electrical conduit is actually very simple and this shouldn't be a problem for anyone to do. However it will require some specialist tools to complete properly. It's simply not a good idea to manually bend the conduit because you won't be able to get an accurate enough result.

1. Hand Bender

It is possible to use a hand bender to bend thin walled electrical conduit up to a maximum of a 1 inch diameter. It will not be possible to bend anything thicker than this with a hand bender because it simply isn't strong enough. A hydraulic bender will be required instead.

Using a hand bender is a very easy solution but you must realize how much pressure you are putting on the conduit when you are bending it. Simply place the conduit into the bender until the bend point lines up with the arrow on the hand bender. Then use the handle and manually bend the conduit to force it into the right shape.

2. Hydraulic Bender

A hydraulic bender is a much more modern solution to the problem of bending conduit. This doesn't rely on any of your own physical straight. Instead it will bend the pipe using a huge hydraulic ram. The hydraulic ram will force the conduit into a forming piece which will push the conduit into the correct angle.

New dies are available to make the conduit a wide range of different angles and curves. This makes a hydraulic bender suitable for virtually every job. However these are very heavy pieces of machinery.

3. Bending with Your Knee

There is always the option of bending electrical conduit by pressing it over your knee. However this won't allow you to achieve extremely accurate results. Actually the only thing that you will be able to do is judge the bends by eye. Pressing the conduit over your knee won't be able to guarantee accurate results.

4. Flexible Conduit

If you don't like the idea of bending electrical conduit then you can actually make this much easier and simpler if you use flexible conduit. This can be bend around into the right shapes without needing to use any form of bending or other solution. This will really simplify the process of installing electrical conduits all around your house without needing to worry about bending anything.