Skip to main content

Electricity is in; filling in the holes

The fire pit under the Milky Way is rapidly becoming a central attraction!
 
But before it got dark...
 
We got to the house and confirmed that the power was now running to our permanent meter and panels. We have a single 120V circuit wired for construction; unfortunately, I wired it wrong, and the GFCI kept tripping. :v) After correcting that, we were confident that the new wiring was correct, and we could fill in the service trenches.

We took another trip to Smith Excavating in Ellensburg for sand.


 
We taped up the conduit ends to keep the conduit clean in case we ever need to pull new wire through them. (That already saved our bacon once!) Then we shoveled sand into the pits where the wires emerge from conduit to protect them from rocks.

Next, we filled the holes back in with a rental excavator.
 

There was a big mound of dirt and rocks at the top of the hill left over from the original trench excavation two years ago. It was a snowmobile obstacle. With what was left of the daylight, Eliot pushed it down the hill to fill in another random trench next to the driveway. Now the property is free of random pits and trenches, ready for the snow and the snowmobiles.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

It is DONE!

The final inspection was today. This guy is Levi, the county inspector, and as you can see, we passed! He only had two questions for me. One was about the energy efficiency credits and the blower door test, for which I had the compensating paperwork for the low-flow faucets already prepared. The second was asking for a smoke detector outside the bedroom; I pointed up and he saw that we already had one tucked into the alcove. And that was that! I got up at 5am to be certain I'd be here before the inspector, and I was ... by about five hours. In that time, I took another truckload of tool buckets down to the storage container, then picked up all the floor protection in the great room and vacuumed and mopped. It's glowing! Then I went back down to the storage container to get a hammer so I could glue in 32 wood plugs to cover the screws for the french doors. I fought with installing the screens, but the frames are too big! The manufacturer said "yeah we don't even make th...
Post a Comment
Read more

Odds and ends

I made progress on a bunch of little things today.  I painted a fencepost in 12" segments and pounded it in at the property line, where the outdoor camera can see it. Now we can measure the snow accumulation. I worked on finishing up almost-complete receptacle branch circuits. The first one I worked on was a little mystery: all the receptacles were installed, but the power didn't reach past a certain point in the line. After some investigation with a wire tracer and watching through the videos we took before covering the walls, I worked out what had happened: two receptacles shared a stud bay, facing into opposite rooms. The plan had been to bring power up to one box, jump over to the other box, and continue back down to the crawlspace to the next box. We forgot the jumper. I couldn't fish a wire between the boxes myself, so that repair waits. Upstairs, installing two receptacles completed the branch. The bathroom vent hole in the tile backer board was a skosh too small. ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Energy efficiency testing

I came up after work to meet Brian, the contractor who is doing our blower door test: In this test, a big fan pumps air out of the house at a prescribed pressure differential, and then the air flow rate is measured in cubic feet per minute, then converted to whole house air changes per hour. The maximum limit is 5.0, and we scored that. Hooray! Brian said that we'd done a pretty solid job sealing the house, especially for an owner-built house; getting extremely tight seals requires careful awareness of the sealing challenges at every stage of construction. Another thing I learned by building a house. While I was up there, I got most of the way through installing a heat pump water heater to comply with energy efficiency requirements I re-discovered when looking up the blower door test requirements. This is all a bit silly. For our application -- a house occupied infrequently -- the on-demand heater is the best efficiency tradeoff, because it has zero standby waste. Unfortunately, th...
Post a Comment
Read more