Phone service - part 2

See also part 1, ordering service.

The phone company (Qwest) installed the phone line. There was already a conduit under the road, from the Qwest junction box to the corner of my land, with a twine through it as a pull line.

The technician attached the pull line to his spool of wire, and hauled it through. Then he put a TELCO demarc box on the post with the power, and wired everything up. Great.

He didn't have the good manners to pull a new string through the conduit along with the wire. Ack! How are we supposed to pull a second line when we develop the other parcel? Or replace the wire if it turns out to be faulty? Or run Ethernet to my neighbor's house across the street?

I read online that a conduit will get full of water and mud over time, making it hard to put a new pull line through in the future. I decided to fix the problem right away.

At the hardware store I bought two spools of nylon string, a small bucket with lid, and the best duct tape they had (Gorilla, extra wide). I loaded the shop vac in the back of the truck, the kids in the front, and headed out to the land.

I put the shop vac in the work pit at the power pole. I taped the hose on to the conduit, as tightly as I could. The wire coming out meant an imperfect fit, but I hoped it would be good enough. The other end of the hose went on the exhaust port of the shop vac. I had a kid turn it on while I watched the other end, to see how much debris would come flying out. There was none, and a good strong breeze. That's a good sign, as it means a good seal on the conduit and no blockages.

I tied the twine to a plastic bag, and stuffed it in the conduit. Then I moved the shop vac hose to the suction port. The twine went on a stick, held by a kid, so it could spin freely. I turned on the shop vac. It groaned for a few seconds, and then the noise changed. I looked inside and there was my bag. Awesome. It was even clean!

I had originally planned on leaving the spool of twine in the plastic bucket, with the lid on, and burying it. This way it would be clean and available when someone digs there in the future. But I thought, "what if the phone company technician who uses this in the future decides to cut it first?" Yelling at him won't put the string back in.

I decided on a different approach. I cut the line, and tied a loop in it. I took the two spools of twine and passed the ends through the loop. I had one kid hold the ends, and one kid hold each spool, propped on a pen to spin freely. The loop acts like a pully. I hauled on the other end. When it came out we now had 4 lines in the conduit.

I tied the ends on to the now-empty cardboard tube from the first twine, and put it in the bucket, and dropped that in the hole for later.

The other ends I tied on to a metal bracket on the power post. These will stick out of the ground, making them obvious to the next person.

I had a bit of string left on the spool. My neighbor is building a house and has a conduit to the same TELCO box, with a string in it. I didn't want her to suffer the same way I did, so I tied my string to hers. This way, when they pull the wire, they will (hopefully) pull a new string along with it.

Electrical Service (part 3)

(See also part 1 - the trench and part 2 - the meter base .)

Puget Sound Energy is the power company here, but they contract out their installation services to POTELCO. They showed up yesterday morning, looked at the meter base, and said "there's a problem". The vertical conduit was secured to the post with a 16" piece of Unistrut. You can see it here:

Apparently they require it to be secured in 2 locations, with the second one lower down. They took the time to pull the cable through the conduit under the road (128' of 350 kcmil), and then headed out.

Early this morning the electrician came back and put the bit of Unistrut in. Then POTELCO came back and hooked up the service. They had to splice to 4/0 AWG because that's all that could fit in the the meter base. I think most of their time was spent splicing.

It took them less than an hour, and they disappeared without saying goodbye :-(. After flipping the main breaker AND the circuit breaker AND the GFCI reset, I was able to get power out of it. So it works. Yay.

One of the workers, José, left behind his knife. He had decorated with red/gold/green stripes of electrical tape. Viva Mexico, José.

Phone service - part 1

Now that the power post is up, I figured it was a good time to ask the telephone company to hook us up. I don't really know how this works, as they don't publish a bunch of instructions online like the power company does.

I ordered service from them today and they said it'll be installed within a week. They didn't ask if there was conduit already (there is) or how far it is from their box to where the demarcation point should be (it's 100') or where the demarcation box should go (on the same post as the power, please). I made it clear that this is bare land.

I expect a lot of chaos here. I figured I should start this process early, so things have time to sort themselves out. I don't mind it taking a while, as I can live without this service for a bit.

I'll keep you posted, dear reader.

Water service - part 1

We're outside of city limits, but within the city's water service area. It's nice to have the elbow room of county rules, but the convenience of city water.

The city requires a building permit from the county before they'' put in water on a parcel. They have a fixed amount of water available, and don't want to promise it to someone who won't use it.

I am far from being ready to build a house, but someone suggested I put in an "RV pad". This would have the standard utilities: water, septic, electricity, and phone. I asked the city if this was OK and they seemed confused at first, and finally said "it's OK with us if it's OK with the county." I asked the county, and they said "do what you want".

I finally got the city to give me something concrete: I needed a letter from the county's building department and environmental health department saying this was OK. I had to give them a copy of my septic permit.

Hooking up to water is expensive. $2500 System Development Charge, $1300 water connection fee, $4500 latecomer's fee (this goes to my neighbor who paid to extend the water main to our neighboorhood), and misc fees, total $9300. It's possible that a well might be cheaper, but it could also be much more expensive if it has to be deep, and this is much more convenient.

If I remove the RV from the site in the future, they will take away the water meter.  How does this work - can I drive it to fill the propane tank? Can I take a weekend (or a month) vacation? Should I find out now or quietly do what I want and see what happens? Better to ask permission or forgiveness? Maybe if I leave on a trip they'll never notice. Maybe they will notice, and make me pay a bunch to have it hooked up again.

Now we wait while they churn through their paperwork, and hopefully they'll come out and put in a water meter sometime soon. What luxury!

Electrical service - part 2

(See part 1, where we put conduit in a trench.)

This week we put up the meter base. The power company gives reasonably good instructions. Here's their diagram:

I thought about doing it myself, but decided to expedite things by hiring an electrician. They estimated $900 for the work, of which 4 hours was labor. I figured it would take me 4x as long to do the work, and I wanted to get the job done sooner. They built the service in their shop, and then we installed it on the land. I helped a little, as I'm qualified to wield a shovel.

- A 6" x 6" x 10' pressure treated post. This is set in to a hole at the end of the trench. We shoveled some dirt underneath to get it to the right height, then more dirt around the base to stabilize it, and then braced it with some boards. Luckily I had some extra bits of wood on site.

- A combination meter base / load center. It's a SIEMENS/ITE unit, and looks a lot like this:

It has slots for 4 breakers (8 if they're duplex) and pass-through lugs. It's intended for a mobile home, but is suitable for our purposes. Perhaps I should have asked for a slightly larger panel, as changing it out in the future will be hard. But it should be good enough.

- A 20A circuit to a 15A GFCI receptacle in a waterproof box, about 6" below the breaker panel. I think I should have asked for a 30A circuit as well (for the RV) or at least a double-gang box, so it'd be easy to add one later. Oh, well, I can handle that myself.

- 2 ground rods, galvanized, 8' long. These are supposed to be placed 6' apart. He drove these in with small electric jackhammer. It took a long extension cord to the neighbor's to power it. It had a socket that fit over the end of the rod. He placed the rods in to the bottom of the trench, since once it's filled that will cover the tops of the rods. That saves 3' of driving them in. However, after about a foot the ground got really hard and the rods stopped moving. He said it was rocks in hard-packed dirt that made it so difficult. We tried digging one out to move it to another location, but couldn't get it to budge. He ended up bending the rods over, away from each other to maintain the required 6' gap.

After driving the rods in, the ends mushroomed a bit. On one it was so bad that he couldn't get the ground rod clamp to slide on. So he used a sawsall to cut the end off the rod. Apparently electricians sometimes cut their ground rods short, to avoid the work of driving the full 8' in to the ground, so inspectors look for that. So he taped the cut end on to the rod, for the inspector to see. I read that you can slip the clamp on ahead of time to avoid that problem.

The power company requires 3/4 yard of sand within shoveling distance of the work pit. Most of the wire is in conduit, but there's a couple feet at each end that is buried directly in the ground. They want to cover that bit sand.

The guy who put the trench in was supposed to leave the sand there, but ran out of time that day. He said I should just come by his yard and he'd put a scoop of sand in the back of my truck, and I could wheelbarrow it up to the right spot. Maybe I'm a wimp, but maybe not:

- The ground is muddy.
- It's up a hill.
- The walking space on the edge of the trench is narrow.
- Sand is plenty heavy.
- The sand was wet.
- The wheelbarrow is heavy.
- Pushing a heavy wheelbarrow up a hill of soft ground and roots is really hard.

I ended up backing the truck up the path, straddling the trench. Couldn't have done it without 4WD in LOW and a reliable spotter. I still only got about 1/2-way. Then I carried sand 1 shovelful at a time until I got tired. Today I went back with 5-gallon buckets. I filled 3 of them with sand and left them by the work pit. I hope that's good enough (it seems like plenty). I still have a bunch of sand in the back of the truck that I need to do something with.

I'd like to know when all this work is going to make me strong like bull. Soon, please!

The post went up on Monday. It passed inspection on Wednesday. Today is Thursday, and I ordered the service from the power company. They said it should be done by next Friday.

Today I took a bunch of pictures of the trench (which will be hidden when we fill it) and the meter base (which will be locked by the power company soon).

Code doesn't require it here, but I'm going to put a piece of yellow tape down along trench, just under the surface, to help us find this stuff if we ever dig here again. We're going to put a water line through here first, though, so it'll be open for a while more.

I didn't realize this before, but the "call before you dig" thing is only for stuff the utility company owns. They are required by law to mark the positions of their underground whatevers, but only what they know about. I plan to put trenches down with power, telelphone, water, sewer, etc. on my land, that are not owned by a utility company. I can call 811 all day long, but they won't find it. I've also heard stories of them getting the markings wrong, sometimes by 10', so that warning tape seems like a really good idea.

Portable sandbox

The power company requires 3/4 yard of sand within shoveling distance of the work pit. I spent the afternoon moving sand. The kids thought they were at the beach.

Road signs

It has been 6 months since I blogged about the need to name roads in our neighborhood. It took 3 months for everyone involved to find names we agreed on, then a month and a half for the County Public Works to process the application, and then a month and a half until they put up signs with the names on them. Those signs just appeared a couple days ago. It's cool to see!

Here's the Mahalo Way sign, with a 9-year-old for scale. Or vice-versa.