Distillery part 5: what we got for Christmas!

Christmas eve day, 2015
It is 60 degrees out at 9 am!
Daryl comes to dig the trench for our electric supply to go from the pole to the building.
Alan Young, our well driller comes to work on the well.
My brother Dave, who is home for Christmas, comes up to help Vince and Daryl's son Derek put the conduit over the electric cable.

It is so warm out that the guys end up working in their t-shirts!

This is the wire being delivered a few weeks ago. NYSEG told us what kind we had to buy, the sample we got from the field engineer, Paul Blakelock, was a foot long and weighed a pound! Vince looked up on line how much it would cost- $13.00 per foot. And we needed about 300 feet. Holy Crap! So he looked around some more and found a place in NJ that had it for $2.85 per foot. WTF? I think we should go into the electric wire resale business! So Vince ordered 400 feet just to make sure we had enough, because the wire has to go up the pole 40 feet, and we weren't exactly sure where we were putting the underground vault for the transformer yet.

Here's a little plug for Daryl. If anyone in the area ever needs excavation work done, he is the guy to call. We call him the "bulldozer whisperer". The first thing he ever did for us was dig our pond, and we wanted an island in the middle of it. He said he'd never done that before, but what the heck, he was game for anything! That was 15 years ago and since then he did the excavation work for our house, garage, Mom's trailer pad, he dug our 2nd pond, and did Vince's parents place when they built their house. He is excellent at reading the land and figuring out drainage so we wouldn't have any water issues. He will work around trees if you want to save them if it is at all possible. And on top of all that, he is a nice guy!

By the time I got out there, the trench was dug up to the creek and the guys had that much wire in the conduit.

Vince and Derek, Vince gluing sections together. They were gluing 10 pieces of conduit together, then sliding it on to the cable. The conduit comes in 10' lengths. So they were sliding 100 feet of conduit at a time. It got stuck on some small rocks a few times. Not fun. Vince said it was like wrestling a 400 foot anaconda!

The trench started filling up with water once Daryl got near the pond and creek. It had been raining for a few days before this, so the ground was really saturated and the creek was running pretty good.

Daryl's getting ready to dig the trench across the creek. They thought if they could divert the water it might keep more of the creek bed from washing out while he dug in there.

We save everything, so this recycled tin is from a shed that was on the property when we bought it in 1998. Vince had it out in the "you never know when you might need it" pile.  It came in really handy today!

It worked! They put the cable down in there and Derek is putting some dirt on there to keep the pipe from floating up. He actually got down in the water and stood on the pipe to hold it down!

It made a great waterfall! Eventually we will put some stones in there and make a real one so it doesn't wash away the dirt covering the wire.

They got the hole for the vault in and finished the trench up to the building. The wire from the vault up to the building is a smaller size than the giant wire coming from the pole.

Before the trench can be filled in all the way, we had to put caution tape in there. It is supposed to be a red caution tape that is specific for underground electric cable. Daryl forgot to bring his, so they sent me down to Greene's to buy some. They only had regular yellow caution tape, so I stopped at Greg's Variety and they had red tape that said 'Danger'. Since it was after noon on Christmas eve, I didn't have a lot of time to run around and look for the correct one, so they just used both of those together and we hope it will be approved! (it was)
Vince was resting and sweaty and I was cold. All I was doing was watching and taking pictures!

Now he's filling in the rest of the trench. As he pushed the dirt back in, the water just gushed up out of there and ran down the side of the road. It's a good thing they had put in a drainage pipe under the end of the road- the water hit that pipe and went under the road and out the other side!

While Daryl was filling in the trench, Dave and Vince started putting in the grounding rod for the electric service to come into the building. There were three 4' pieces of copper rod that had to be driven into the ground (mostly rocks and gravel surrounded by a little dirt!) Vince finished getting the meter box wired today (the 26th), we are almost ready for the rough wire inspection!

These pictures are from before Thanksgiving when Alan first got there to drill the well. He had a major delay when his engine quit working one day, he thought it was the fuel pump, but when they put a new one in, it didn't fix it. It turns out that it needed a new timing chain and gears.... Since he had already started drilling, he couldn't take the rig to the shop to get the engine fixed, so he had to pull the engine out and take it to get it fixed. Thankfully the weather was so mild, it would have been even worse if had been below freezing! He had it back in the rig last week and hit water at 135' on the 24th. 10 gallons a minute! yay!

So it was a Merry Christmas for us! Water and an electric line! Ho,ho,ho, kersploosh!

P.S. We have since been approved for our rough wire inspection and electric service hookup, now we can insulate and sheetrock....and get the water hooked up..... and get the heating system going.........to be continued!