Wednesday, October 22, 2008

Sure glad Barry isn't here...

... to see what is happening to his yard.

Seriously, they are being extremely careful of all the stuff - the ponds, the trees. The house.

Here's where the trench runs up to the house. Those pipes are the tubing for the geothermal wells.


Here's something interesting: They found not one, but two, wells in the trench. The one you can see very clearly. The other was right at the edge of the trench, so they left it alone. You can just see the concrete cap there in the trench.

That's a great view of the old well. It was half full of dirt. They filled it up the rest of the way.

Despite their care, the team had a very tough time yesterday, as after they excavated neatly around our water and sewer lines, a chunk of concrete from the fill pile tumbled down and broke both lines. This was at about 3:30 yesterday afternoon. They tracked down supplies and kept at the job until 10:00 last night when they got the water and sewer lines repaired. I was very impressed that they cared.

The one fellow is just an artist with a Bobcat. Watching him in action is almost like watching a ballet - a big, metallic ballet dancer on treads. He perched that 'Cat right on the edge of the trench and delicately slung the bucket around, moving dirt with such finesse. He was a pleasure to watch.

We're soooo close to having heat now, I can almost taste it. Just one more step to go - hooking up the electricity at the box. Then we flip the switch and go. (Right?)

4 comments:

Aaron said...

Yeah, innit fun to watch a craftsman at work, i.e. anyone who's really good at his job?

There's been some earthmoving going on around the building I work in, and I've been enjoying watching the deft excavator and dozer operators using the mass and inertia of their machines to manipulate great piles of dirt.

Now, what does the E.L.E. motto mean? I tried a couple of Latin translators on the web and got nowhere. They trip over the final word, I think.

Maria Stahl said...

Doesn't it mean "Serious Bad Guys" or something like that?

Amrita said...

Are geothermal well like hot underground springs?

Maria Stahl said...

Amrita, not quite - they just use the heat of the earth and run it through a heat exchanger. Even though it doesn't feel very warm to us, it still contains a lot of heat energy. Here is a writeup about it:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geothermal_heat_pump