wiring a basement

[ITE]

I need to add some outlets and lights to a basement with poured walls. The walls are not covered with anything, concrete is exposed and painted. Its basicly one big room. The ceiling is open to the first floor floor joists. The service panel is located in the basement mounted on a wall. Im pretty sure that I will need to use a raceway or conduit for this. Does the raceway just have to extend to the top of the wall or does it have to go all the way to the service box and cover the whole run of wire?

thanks

[roger g]

Up here in Canada I believe ( which means it's a definite maybe) that any exposed wire less than 5 feet above the ground must be protected. Conduit or armoured cable. I've seen boxes ramset right into the concrete walls and the wire clamps ramset also where the wires run down the wall to the box. As far as running a raceway in the ceiling it would work but what happens when you want to finish the ceiling and the wires are now in the way. You might not want to finish the ceiling now but the next guy might.

[Sparks]

Rogers right. Make sure if you run emt, etc you won't be screwing yourself for future plans. You could run armored cable or mc or conduit or wiremold. If you run emt from box to ceiling and then install a j-box. You could come out of j-box with romex cable and go from there. But, then you'll have to protect the cable again when you run down to your receptacles. That's acceptable, but I don't know if it would make any sense for your application. You can also install conduit through drilled holes in the floor joists ( a pain) but this is done all the time in Chicago where nm (romex) is not allowed. The cable doesn't need to be protected for the full run, just where it may be possible it would be damaged. Emt installations usually look neater if done right, but ac or mc is a heck of alot easier, especially if you've never bent pipe before. If you decide on only emt, I would recommend you also running a grounding conductor and not just rely on the emt for your grounding path, although not required.