Hard labor, hot dogs, and an approval

 

Remember the electrical pits we covered up with the excavator a couple weeks ago? First order of business was to uncover the one at the top of the hill. Turns out our ridiculous 36kW water heater will dim the lights less if we pay the power company to install bigger wires from the transformer to the house. So we have to uncover our conduit so they can pull the new wires through.

Eliot and I dug down to the existing wires, then along the conduit. Neither conduit had bellends at the end, which seemed wrong. Mabye we lost track of how they'd been installed a couple years ago? Concerned that there was a gap in the conduit a little farther away from the transformer, we dug and dug six feet along the conduits, and didn't find the gap. Eliot had a brilliant idea: if the conduit had a gap filled with dirt, sound wouldn't travel through the pipe. We remembered you could slap the pipes to make cool echo noises.

So I went down to the other end, pulled the tape off, dug out the mud that had found its way into the pipe anyway, and put my ear to it. I heard the classic Christmas carol "Pour Some Sugar On Me" by Def Leppard piping through the conduit, and radioed back our victory.

 

There wasn't much snow left ... other than the mound under the roofline. Siggy made a short sled track out of it anyway. Siobhan daydreamed about riding sleds.

 

Eliot and Jon grabbed a spare log and lopped it into rounds.

Eliot split a few, then Siobhan tried her hand at it (and still has her toes!), and even Siggy took a swing at it.

We stacked most of it, and used our extremely green firewood to have a little cookout with wieners, mozzarella sticks, and marshsmallows (photo at top).

One other task we had to do was change how neutral and ground were bonded on one of our panels. The inspector had left this correction for us last week, and we figured we'd take care of it on the weekend. But when we looked at it, it seemed crazy to stick the #4 stranded wire into the tiny lug in the neutral bar. We asked Brett, and he confirmed that it was crazy.

So we held off until I could talk to the inspector on Monday. The inspector said he'd be happy if we jumpered between the bus bars, which we could do with solid wire, which would be much easier. So Eliot and I bought a stub of copper wire in Seattle, drove to Cle Elum on Monday afternoon, and torqued down two screws. We texted this photo to the inspector, and he signed us off.

We're hoping PSE can get the new service installed -- and we can fill in our holes -- before the snow hits!