Electricity, Part 1

To this point, we had been working with hand tools and, when we needed power, various implements that plugged into one of the 3 generators that we've run on the project. When I came back to the project in the spring of 2008, the power company had erected utility poles that connected me to my neighbor's lines, as well as a transformer. Jerron and I dropped by A-1 Rentals and got ourselves a Barreto 912 trenching machine.



Trenching is dangerous, as we already know.



Unfortunately, Barreto 912's are complete garbage. As you can see, we're not digging through anything more than small gravel, and this jalopy struggled to make any progress. Very quickly we wore through one of the links in its chain and had to return to A-1 to complain. We only got this far:



We got a much beefier Ditch Witch trenching machine to replace the Barretto. Here's Jerron running the trencher with a thermonuclear explosion in the background:



The Ditch Witch made short work of the trench, which was about 200 feet from the pole to the building. If you go much further than 250' between the transformer and the house, you risk getting a voltage drop.



We put a 4/0 gauge jacketed aluminum cable in the bottom of the trench and backfilled it. At the pole, the cable entered through holes in the bottom of the box:



The conductors tied into the power blocks:


... and the ground tied into the ground block:



The silver wire in the ground block is the ground; it runs out of the bottom of the box and into the ground. Inside the building, we hooked up a breaker box:


Now we can run power tools without listening to the generator! Almost as importantly, now Chris can plug in his XM and broadcast it at low power to our lame weather radio. Squizz and Chill are the preferred stations on this job.
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