A beautiful but busy weekend here in the Pond Zone. Fall moved in quite suddenly, replacing the hot humid temps with a blustery cool that's nice for sleeping and for long days in the open pit mine I call the Pond. This weekend I resolved to finish the electrical wiring. You might remember that we discovered a bare 240vac well pump wire running right through the project. We gave up on digging the whole wire run up (it dove down below four foot at the pond edge...ug!) and instead focused on digging a new channel for it and the 110vac we'll be using for the pond pumps.
I started the weekend off with a 50 foot roll of 10-3, a 50 foot roll of 12-3, and a whole bunch of three quarter inch schedule forty plastic conduit and connectors. Everything fit at the store, but there's fitting and then there's fitting. Finished digging all of the trenches, layed out the conduit, double checked and triple checked length and fit, then cut and glued most of it together. It was a wonderful thing, elegant even.
Now to snake the wire through the pipe. I caught a cool trick on the Hometime show a while back where you tie a little plastic bag corner to the end of your snaking rope and hook a shop vac to the other end of the pipe to suck the rope through. Works like a charm. Then tape the rope securely to the two wires, get Faith to pull the rope from one end and I feed the wire into the other...it's about fifty feet with two gentle bends. No. Way. Jose.
If you aren't familiar with 10-3 cable let me describe it. Hold out your hand and grab your pinky. Wiggle it. The cable is about that size except it doesn't really wiggle. Tape a slightly smaller sibling to its side and you have zero wigglebility. Sure, if you are holding a ten foot section it may bend begrudgingly but inside a pipe with barely enough room for a thumb it doesn't bend at all. We tried gooping it up with slippery soap but after a few feet the operation came to a halt. Disconnect the second wire, try just the well wire, and with lots of grunting and sweating it finally made it through. Which is a shame, because that proved absolutely nothing.
Luckily 3/4 inch pipe is super cheap (a buck and a half for a ten foot section) since we had to give up on it and go back to the store. I end up going back to the store a lot during these big projects and I wonder if it is just me or does everyone suffer these mini failures? You measure, plan, and analyze to get the optimal solution only to find out that the store just doesn't make the kind of tools or supplies you came up with. It may have taken days to come up with the plan and you are faced with re-thinking the whole thing in the plumbing aisle of the hardware store.
I ended up exchanging the 50 foot wire for 100 foot rolls and getting a hundred feet of 1 1/4 inch water pipe. The pipe is flexible enough that we only needed one connector (to T the pond wire off) and almost large enough to snake the wire by tying it to the cat and having her crawl through. Maybe not, but I like the visual of the cat doing some work. Bigger pipe was the right solution even if a bit of an overkill.
The well pump is hooked up, long live the well pump! Now we can return to our regularly scheduled project. The photo above shows "The Rock" and alongside it is a black enclosure for the new pond pump. They call it a skimmer, since it sits right at water level and sucks in water predominately from the top. The first photo, btw, shows the view from the top of "waterfall hill." The waterfall is hooked to the skimmer by a big ol' pipe that I ran along the edge of the pond.
There's still some plumbing to do, what appears to be an endless cycle of digging, the laying out of the pond liner, and finally...more rocks! I'm starting to worry that Winter will win this race.
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