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Saturday, June 22, 2013

Work continues

It feels like a milestone, or a really great Christmas present.  Yesterday the pole barn went live, with electricity that is.  After nearly two weeks of intermittent digging the trench was completed, the wire run through conduit, the conduit set in the trench. 

The trench is two feet deep.  The spring rain had soaked the clay enough to make shoveling not total misery, except for the perimeter drain.  The perimeter drain is a vein of large stones, about 2 inches, that is about a foot below the surface and goes to god knows how deep.  The trench crossed the drain for about 10 feet.  Shoveling through the stones was pure hell, and stones kept falling in from the side of the trench to make things worse.  And there were tree roots that had to be axed.

Yesterday I hooked up the wire to the load panel in the house and the panel in the pole barn.  Now there are lights and electricity in the barn.  It sure is nice to be able to plug in a tool or compressor without running a heavy 100 ft extension cord from the house to the barn.  Lights that work!

The trench still has to be filled back in and I'm not in a real big hurry to do that.  At least it's a lot easier than digging it out.

I built a little platform so the water pump can set level on the banks of the pond.  It's now set up so the pump can be hooked up quickly via a 50 ft hose to the hose reel, which holds 130 feet of hose.  Combined with the 20 feet of PEX tubing from pond to pump there's 200 feet of hose. That's enough hose to get water to any vegetable or flower bed on the property.  I gave the beds a good soaking a few days ago as there hadn't been any rain in a week.  I like to first water the vegetable beds, then the flower beds, then return to the vegetable beds for another soaking. 
 

Today there was a downpour but it's only a matter of time before the summer draughts begin.  I'm ready.
 
 

1 comment:

Mark Willis said...

I'm sure that in retrospect you will feel that all the hard work was worthwhile - but maybe not for a week or two!

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