Running the Electric Line to the House

This has been quite an event for me the last couple of days. I officially moved my living quarters from my little cabin to the wide expanses of the house on Saturday and it sure is a heck of a lot easier heating the house instead of an uninsulated shed.

Unfortunately it’s been cloudy here for over a week now and subsequently the solar heating system is taking a rest, but the wood stove has been doing its thing to keep the temperature quite comfortable and the under-floor vent for the stove is working like a charm. I am amazed by the volume of air that comes through the pipe that feeds the stove. That’s a good sign since an air tight house should pull lots of air through any opening while a wood stove is burning.

Sleeping here in the house is nice for light sleepers like me. You can’t hear any outside noises. No barking dogs, no highway traffic, no owls, no coyotes, no cows—just the sound of the occasional lady bug slamming into something inside of the house. (Those dang lady bugs are still around, but slowly I am catching them all with a vacuum cleaner.)

Work this week continued (sporadically) on completing the wood paneling for the ceiling and I am happy to report that as of this evening all of the 16 wedges are done! I’ve got about another three hours of panel work to board up the center cupola/whole house fan area and then it’s on to blowing in the cellulose. Plans are to do that this coming Tuesday. I’ll be sure to report on that in the next installment of the journal.

Here’s a photograph of the underground vent that feeds fresh air to the wood stove.

Besides moving into the house and finishing up the ceiling, the electric line was trenched to the house on Friday (in the rain) thanks to local electricians and Tri-County Electric. I was rather surprised that they showed up because of the icky weather, but they decided to come out anyway and I was glad to see them. I electric meter is mounted on a pedestal down by the gravel road instead of affixing it to the side of the house. This gives me plenty of options down the road if I choose to run a line to the yet-to-be-built garage/workshop and other outbuildings.

Things didn’t go so smoothly for the electricians though. First the trenching machine ran into the vein of rock near the house. I kind of expected they would run into it, but I was surprised as to the size of some of the rocks/boulders they were running into. Their poor trenching machine took a beating, but it got the job done even with a muffler that kept falling off and the stuck-on-high throttle.

Because of all the boulders, the trench didn’t go straight like we had hoped so instead of running PVC pipe, an alternative was found. Luckily, Tri-County Electric who had to be there to connect the line to the transformer, had a coil of “gopher” tubing. It’s a flexible corrugated tubing that made things go much easier due to the not-to-straight trench.

After the trench was dug and the electric line was in the trench, the phone line went in too. A few years ago when we had a telephone line installed, the phone company was nice enough to leave me a bunch of extra cable, so it could be trenched to the house once the walls were up. So, in went the phone cable.

By early afternoon, it was time for the electricians to go to their next trenching job. (They were hoping to dig three trenches that day.) Unfortunately, their number one workhorse truck had thrown a rod the other day, so they had borrowed one of their father’s old trucks. Unfortunately, this truck’s four wheel drive didn’t work and sure enough, they got stuck in the mud. So…they had to take the trencher off the trailer (again) and use it to push them out. (While they were sliding around in the mud, they almost took out the meter and electric panel that they just installed hours ago!) What a mess! But, they finally got out and on their way. I hope the rest of their day went better. (They said they should have gone fishing instead.)

So that’s about it for this week. I did mount the electric boiler on a panel but that’s about it. I hope to work on that too this coming week. We’ll see how things go. There’s still a lot of loose ends to take care of, but I hope to get most of the pressing projects completed in the next couple of weeks and by the looks of things weather-wise, it could be a cold winter. But then there’s that El Nino…but where? Maybe November will be warmer?

Here’s a photograph of a Pileated Woodpecker. They are a common bird for these parts, but always allusive when it comes to having their picture taken.