Pump Monster

I bought a portable pump at the local HD last fall to pump water up into the stock tank and run the pressure washer and make concrete.   It came with 1" threaded fittings and an adapter for garden hose.   Since I need to pump about 200 feet and 50 feet vertically, garden hose is pretty feeble.  So, I bought some 1" flexible pipe... but turns out the pump is Italian and has British Standard Pipe threads which are bloody useless in the States.   So I had to use the garden hose adapter and a pile of fittings:

• 1" BSP to garden hose
• garden hose to 3/4 NPT 
• 3/4 NPT to 3/4 pipe
• 3/4 pipe to 1" reducer bushing
• 1" bushing to 1" coupling 
• coupling to black pipe 

Looks ridiculous, but .... this took me awhile to figure out so it looks good to me. 

Now all I need is expansion tank, pressure switch and a pumphouse.  

Opening the site

First trip for 2010 next weekend. Heading up Thursday night to meet National Grid on Friday, as well as contractor(s) too about foundation and shell. Other tasks for this trip in order of importance:

• Set up strings over the perimeter showing where foundation wall gets placed.
• Set strings for porch and center line piers
• Drill holes for rebar 
• Chisel rock to 3 in 12
• Build forms for footers using scribed plywood 
• Build 2x4 staging platforms for logs 

Foundation

Asked structural engineer to do another plan, this time with concrete block foundation and alternate for poured foundation. Motivation was pricing of micro-lams needed for the pier type foundation, worry about lugging them microlams into place, and a solid wall is better for snow anyway. Cost is probably equal, but we will never REALLY know.

Insanely frantic at work, partly on software, web, marketing type projects (infrastructure for knowledge based biz), so hard to focus.

National Grid

National Grid called (at 7PM!) and said "You need to get easements from your neighbors plus copies of deeds plus copies of tax maps. If you can not get easements, you will not get power." I am half-hoping we don't get it, since I have some goofball ideas about 12V power and PV panels that I might get to try, although realistically the budget is long gone already.

I met neighbor Harry Ostrander the other week (other side of Thisse camp) and he wants power too and he is out next to Terry Thisse. If NG (did no one in marketing notice the initials?) brings power to more than one person, the 7.6 kV primary line is free, residents just pay for the secondary line. So I need to call all these people and chase things down, and see what happens.

Notes from Thanksgiving Work (2/2)

The "after pictures" of the bedrock are shown here, plus I wander down by the lake mumbling about the dock.

Thanksgiving work - Dirt

Did not get very far on my do list when I realized that item 2 should be "dig out bedrock completely." Stayed with Tim and Cathy Buckingham in town who let me take showers and fed me as well (very nice!). Despite wearing the natty rain pants shown in the video to keep mud off my pants, I brought quite a bit of that mud into their house. This short video just shows me doing work (drill hole and dig), so not terribly interesting, but gives you an idea of what I did for 3 or 4 days.

Plans

Latest set of plans are in the documents section of the web site.