Progress keeps progressing

Today John, the forms guy, put up the forms and rebar for the water tank platform and the well site. He will return soon with a ready mix truck and concrete pump to fill the forms.

Two leach lines to be used alternately

Meanwhile Thurman and Chad trimmed trees and widened the approach to the tank site so the concrete pouring can go as scheduled. They had the septic tank system prepared with the leach lines on their deep gravel beds, waiting for Samantha to come and inspect their work for the county. She signed it off and they then buried all their nice work. I asked Thurman if he ever felt sad to see all his work covered up with only some risers poking out of the ground as reminders that a human hand had done some beautiful things there. “No,” he said. “As long as I don’t have to dig it up it again I’m happy.”

The two vertical pipes have the valves to switch from one leach line to the other.
The green riser is one of two so you don't have to dig deep to pump the tank.

He showed us how to switch from one leach line to the other, and suggested we do it annually. “I remember to do it on my system by making it part of my wife’s birthday celebration,” he said with a hearty “wink wink” laugh.

Serious dirt moving started today

Dad and I would have used dynamite

We had the percolation test holes for the septic system done a couple of weeks ago, but today marks the beginning of “real” work. Thurman brought his son, Chad, with him to start putting in the flat spot for our water tanks. To get up the hill to that site, some small trees had to be sacrificed in order for the huge concrete truck to get up there. Chad’s skill with the backhoe is impressive. With it he plucked out some granite boulders that would surely tax two guys with rock bars, like my father and I had to use about 60 years ago on our little mountain homestead. Our advantage back then was that if we encountered a rock too big for us to move, we would just tootle down to the hardware store and buy some dynamite! Times have changed. A powerful Caterpillar backhoe is today’s dynamite.

Nice new road for the cement truck

While the flat place was being dug out, our shiny new septic tank was delivered by the man from Capital Pipe in Oakhurst. It will hold 1,500 gallons of awful offal. I’ll be long gone before that happens since many of the tanks in these mountains haven’t been pumped in over 30 years and are still going strong. Another delivery of several cubic yards of gravel will be needed for the leach field. Our road is getting a workout, but neighbor Bill has been using his tractor to take out many of the nasty bumps. Thanks, Bill!

Poor Karla--she wanted pink

We got the quotations for the solar powered well pump, the pipe, the storage tanks, fire hydrant and associated stuff. Fortunately we were sitting down when we opened the envelope. At over $29,000 it came to roughly $10,000 above our high estimate when we started the project. That ten grand could have gotten us 24-karat gold fixtures in the bathroom; we’ll have to settle on chrome plated brass like the peasants we’re starting to resemble. That estimate doesn’t include Thurman and Chad’s efforts in moving dirt.

Or the 850-foot double-cased well itself.

Tap water ain’t cheap.

Nice Bossy, nice Bossy!

With horns like these, cows demand respect from us little two-leggers! How would you like to find fourteen cows in your “yard” one morning? That’s what we encountered today, so as usual we lured them into one of our pens by tossing out some hay. Then we called the neighbor they belong to. He said his own fences were in good repair, but a mutual neighbor, the guy who owns the regional phone company, couldn’t care less about his own fences. Unfortunately the phone guy’s property abuts about a half-mile of ours, and is in a location where we almost never go because it’s so steep and rocky.

In this part of the country if you don’t want somebody’s livestock on your place you fence them out; they don’t necessarily have to fence them in.

But we’re busy, we complain. Today I’m doing annual maintenance on our road grader so I can patch a washout on our road, Karla is embroiled in working with our Congressman to reverse the Park Service’s cowardly decision to kick our horses out of Sequoia-Kings Canyon National Park this summer, and tomorrow Thurmond is bringing his backhoe to put in our septic tank, clear off a place for our water tank platform, and cut over a thousand feet of trench for our water pipes. Who has time to fix fence, I ask you.

Croc in the grass

Imagine our surprise to be on our daily walk and come across this sneaky creature over near the corral. It wasn’t moving, obviously hoping we wouldn’t spot it. Fortunately I had my cell phone in my shirt pocket so I snapped this picture before the crocodile could disappear back under the grass.

We had just come down from our water tank where I used our old Garmin Nüvi GPS instrument to determine the elevation at the tank. I subtracted the elevation at the house to see if it agreed with the water pressure we get at the house. Our analog water pressure gauge reads 65 PSI. According to the GPS, we should have 70 PSI. I won’t quibble. It’s close enough to verify the pressure we can expect at our new house site.

Tuesday we measured off the trench we’ll dig from our water tank site to the house, and another trench to the well site. We trudged up the hill and planted little red flags to show where we expect it to be. Jay, the well pump guy, was here Monday and told us what to expect when he comes back with a solar-powered pump, a big concrete ready-mix truck, and a whole lot of pipe. He said one of the most expensive things about putting in pipe is the trench, which is dug with a big backhoe. In our case, the guy who digs the hole for the septic tank will also be digging the water line trenches. (If the septic is dug first, I hope he washes off his digging bucket really well before he digs the water line.)

We think the tank site we picked is 150 feet higher than the house. That will give us the pressure we expect. The pipe from the tank to the house is about 960 feet long, and is big—four inches in diameter to get the flow required at the fire hydrant that will be installed near our driveway, and to provide the flow necessary for the fire sprinklers in the ceilings throughout the house. A smaller pipe will go from the well to the storage tank, and will be just over 1,100 feet long. Over 2,000 feet of pipe! Gad.

We want to install two 5,000-gallon tanks. That will store enough water to get us through any period when the sun don’t shine. They will sit on a concrete pad measuring 14 by 28 feet. Jay says he won’t put tanks directly on the ground because they’d be undermined by squirrels and gophers and eventually sink, breaking the connection to the pipes. Good idea.

The pump is a three-stage helical-impeller affair that can push water over 600 feet upward. It runs on any voltage between 30 and 300, either DC or AC. Very versatile, methinks. He expects to get five gallons per minute in our case. Not as capable as the well’s 27 gallons per minute potential, but good enough for us for now.

Jay is working on an estimate for the job, and we will be sure to be sitting down when we open the letter.