How do I bend conduit in this Tight Space?

Question

I only have 11 inches to do a 90 degree turn and an offset into the solar inverter. I tried doing both with the 90 before the offset into the box, but the emt jutted out past the window sill. The other alternatives are to do a offset before the 90, but then a long portion of conduit will be raised four inches off the wall, which is no good. Another possibility I thought about was an offset at a diagonal, but I'm not sure how that would work. Any suggestions are much appreciated.

SOLVED

Thank you for your suggesttions, they are all good and would have worked. I ended up going with the LB approach, which uses very little space to the left of the inverter.

Answer 1

Welcome to the cheater's compact offset. The die-cast ones.

Wait - FOUR inches? The entry is 4 inches off the wll face? Not designed well for surface mounting with conduit. Use flex conduit or use an LB. The LB might involve running at an angle and bending the same angle on the end of the conduit.

Answer 2

Super easy. Come right out of the solar box with a prefab 90. Feel free to trim off some of the straight part of it - just make sure the EMT connector will fit.

OK now what do you have?

A 90 going almost straight up, but it will be leaning back maybe 20-30 degrees to touch the wall.

Next part. A straight pipe comes down the wall flush, and has a 20-30 degree bend right near the bottom. This perfectly complements the aforementioned angle. Get it? Add a coupling and you're done in the area.

This might take some fitting and fussing to get right.

How to make it more compact

The bender leaves you 2-4 inches of straight at each end. The connector only needs about an inch. So feel free to cut any excess down with a hacksaw. Your multi-tool has a wedge shape (when closed) specifically to ream EMT pipe. Never use a tubing cutter on electrical conduit, you'll be all day taking the burr off which you must do.

Now here's the real trick. You don't have to be a pipe-fitting rock god. You don't even have to be any good with EMT. Simply go ahead and let the pieces overlap by a few inches when fitting up. Then, cut off the overlap before installing the connector. The connector takes about 1/8 inch.

Smaller still, and cheaper, if wires fit

Now if your wires are small enough for 1/2" conduit and you want to save a few bucks and have a more compact install, go ahead and use 1/2" EMT instead of 3/4". To step that hole down to 1/2" EMT, use two conduit reducing washers.