fishing conductors through conduit

Typically, you want to feed from the panel, if it is hot. The idea is to catch the fish tape by having your hand over the conduit while someone else pushes it to you. Then, when the tape and wire start back in the pipe, you don't have a bare fish tape flying around your hot buss, and everything that is likely to flop around is insulated.

If the panel is hot I would use a non conductive nylon fish tape. They are expensive but better safe than sorry. And if you want to be safe I would follow the OSHA rules to the T which generally means turning off the power if at all possible, or insulating yourself from the hot equipment, or insulating the hot equipment from you.

In about 1999 at the Red Dog Mine Port Site near Kotzebue, Alaska I had the experience of installing a ct at the top of an 800 ampere section of switchgear by myself. My section wasn't hot but the next was. A piece of steel about 12 inches long somehow flipped out of place when I tried to drill it and traveled into the next section. The 480 volt hot conductors were 8-350's in parallel coming from the top of adjacent section and terminated at the bottom. Somehow that piece of steel failed to hit the buses or else I would be dead. I was almost wrapped up inside the section where I was working. I did not insulate the next section from me and was very, very lucky. I simply got careless and got in a hurry as happens so often.

Depending on the conduit size, you can blow a piece of string/small rope through with the 'blow' end of a shop vac, use that to pull through a bigger rope, use the rope to pull the cable through.

Dave

In the UK Electricity at Work regs say that you should not work on or near live equipment unless reasonably practicable.