The Quarky Engineer

Labor Day is a good day for labor.

We have been working on the grading of the hill as it goes away from the back of the house. It was originally flat for a bit, then about 1:1 slope. Now it starts falling sooner, but is around 2:1 slope. Once we get the final grade we will hydroseed with something for stabilization.

Wall construction is also almost complete. All we need now are the cap blocks. 100 blocks in total, 400,000 lbs.

ATS Septic tank installation time. There are two tanks in an ATS system before the drain field.

I’ll be pulling wire this weekend, 9am-5pm Saturday and Sunday. If anyone wants to come by and check things out and lend a hand, drop me a msg and I’ll give ya directions! It looks to be a nice weekend here in Portland!

With the car week behind us, it is time to get back to the new house build. The excavator crew are back at work building the retaining wall that we need along one side of the house. The natural terrain falls off pretty fast there, so the geotech engineered a wall structure. It uses 80 of these 4000 lbs concrete ‘lego’ blocks that interlock, and each layer has this cool geogrid metal fabric that extends under the driveway to provide slip support. This brings us up to almost 2.4 million pounds of concrete total in construction so far.

We also have all 10 electrical panels installed with the large conductors mostly complete. Circuit termination can really get going now. I need to get working on the transfer switch configuration, and get the 16kw UPS on order.

Lots to do in the coming months… time to get cracking!

It would seem odd to really need a lambo as a camera car… but I suppose if you have one why not!

It is amazing what difference a day makes with power tools.

Having completed most of the hole drilling and route mapping, it is time to pull wire. Lots of wire. I have all of the wire onsite, the drops labeled, and the paths marked.

I am planning on doing the big pull on Saturday August 24th and Sunday August 25th. ( 2 weeks from now ) This is a task that gets much much easier with more and more people. A single pull can take 30 mins with a single person, but with 4 or 5 people along the path it can take 1 min.

So, if you are interested and available to help out anytime that weekend, I would be extremely grateful. There isn’t any particular skillset required as the task is more about coordination and movement. There are some paths that might need some replanning in flight, so if you are someone that like puzzle solving that might be just the thing for you.

I have all of the equipment needed (wire being the biggest), although bringing a pair of gloves is probably helpful. If you are planning on building your own house someday this is a cool way to see some wiring ideas you might want to use.

If you are able to help out, drop me a message and I’ll coordinate logistics. Even just an hour of help makes a huge difference! [ Note – helping out also means you get first invite to housewarming parties, and lift time in the shop. 😉 ]

It’s trench time! We got approval for the electrical service plan, so it is time to do some digging. I currently have a single transformer across the driveway from the house, but it isn’t sufficient capacity for the service. Since it is also a bit of an odd location I decided to relocate the pad to the back edge of the driveway, and run new conduit from the house to the transformer as well as new high voltage primary conduit from the new pad to the original vault.

I did 3 3″ conduits to the transformer from the house which will support the two meter setup with a dedicated 200A Tesla/EV charging meter (on a different rate plan). The three conduits will also allow me to have a 600amp primary service instead of a 320amp if the need arises. I have a tertiary service with meter and transformer down at the gate, as pulling 120/240 over 1000ft isn’t a great idea. PGE also has to upgrade the fuse up on Skyline from a 6amp (7200v) to a 25amp (7200v)

I got the natural gas sleeve installed, the primary water line connected all the way to the house, and 5 data conduits down the the front gate as well as a patch area. The conduits going to the gate are a single pull of almost 1000ft, but I suspect I am going to need to have an intermediate pull box as I don’t think the natural gas guys are going to pull that far in a single pull.

The gas line in the house is mostly installed. It is a 2psi setup designed for 1.5 million BTUs.

I’ll run a 12 fiber single mode in one of the conduits all the way to the gate, plus some control lines for other things.