11.13.2016

Kyle came late last night from NYC - unfortunately, Julia had a meeting on Monday so she couldn't join him (then it later got canceled so she could have come!).  We really appreciate him coming to help us with finishing up getting the trench done and the electric service wire in place.

The first step was to finish the trench.  Jim started digging from the edge closest to the house back towards the trench.

Then it was Kyle's turn to do some digging...

Jim used the Bobcat to go get sand...

After crumbing out the trench a bit, we put a few inches of sand in the bottom.

Once the trench was dug as close as possible to the existing trench, it was time for some scary Bobcat maneuvering.  Jim had to carefully drive across the trench...

 

...and then turn and dig.

 

 

 

He had to go back across and move down a couple of times in order to get the trench dug.  Kyle was in the trench to take this picture to show just how scary it looks!

 

 

 

Finishing up the last little bit...

 

Just a little hand digging at the end and then we put sand in the rest of the trench.

Now that the trench is finished, time to start unrolling the wire.  This is heavy gauge service wire - actually 3 separate wires, 2 hot and 1 neutral.

I stood on the end to try and keep it in place while Jim and Kyle unrolled it. 

All unrolled and stretching it out down the side of the house...

Next step was to wrap the ground wire around the service wire.  This took all of us to accomplish this task - Jim unrolled the ground wire and lifted it up and over the service wire, Kyle did the wrapping, and I held the end of the service wire up so that Jim could maneuver the roll. 

The end result...



The wire has to be in conduit under the driveway, so they put the conduit on the end and then pulled it over the wire.

 

Maneuvering the conduit down the wire...

We ended up using 3 pieces of conduit just to make sure it would cover the entire driveway area.  Gluing the pieces together...

All finished...

Then they had to place the wire into the trench...

Continuing to place the wire into the trench...

Now comes the really hard part - getting all those wires up into the conduit and into the meter.  Jim put fish tape down the conduit...

Once the fish tape came out, they wrapped it around the first wire really well with tape and then had to shove it up the conduit. 

Two wires up at this point...

Once all of the wires were pulled through, Jim wanted some extra slack because there was so scrapes on the ends of the wire that he wanted to cut off.  So he had to push all of the wires up into the conduit while Kyle pulled them out.

Using the wire cutters to cut the wire.

 

Mission accomplished!  Jim got all the wires in the meter box (not an easy task because of all the extra wire) and the temporary power turned back on.  He'll wire the new wire in later.  Thank goodness Kyle was here to help Jim - this was really tough work! 

 

It ended up being just a gorgeous day - the warmest we've had in awhile so it was perfect to work outside.

 

High 55/Low 27