11.23.2014

Today's temperatures warmed up - however, since the top few inches of ground had been frozen, that equaled some muddy ground at the land today.

This isn't a good angle, but Jim got the area for the distribution box all finished and crumbed out.

Then we figured out where the first of the 3 lines for the leech bed will go and got the lines marked.  Each line has to be about 36" wide and 32 feet long.  There are chambers called infiltrators that will go in each of these trenches.  This is a totally different system than we used in Ohio - that had an aeration tank, which we won't have here.  The septic design that we had to have drawn up for us is fairly vague, so Jim is figuring out some of the specifics as he goes!

So then it was back in the Bobcat to start digging.

Again...just a few rocks to keep things interesting.

You would think that this would be an easy dig - straight line, just keep moving backwards.  But unfortunately, there is a slope to the ground here which is good for what we are doing but makes digging difficult.  If Jim lined up the tracks with the trench, the excavator sits on a slope and would make one side of the trench deeper than the other.  So he has to position the tracks to go across the trench area and dig that way.  Which is fine, except that you have to constantly reposition - made a little tougher with slightly soggy ground.

Then the other fun part of this is that the slope of the trench has to go down 1/16th of an inch every foot.   That's really precise when you are digging with an excavator!  Every time he would dig an area and need to move the excavator, he would get down into the trench, hand shovel to crumb out the area, and then we would take laser measurements to make sure we were at the right levels.

I'm thinking that when the septic designer is sitting at his desk designing this system and specifying that the slope has to be precisely 1/16" every foot, he's not planning for encountering gigantic boulders like this one!

That's a huge boulder - kind of throws off the calculations!

By the end of the workday, we had a beautiful trench, perfectly sloped, and almost got to the end of where it needs to be.

 

High 49/Low 33 - mostly cloudy