Cut-off and breaker box. We'll run power from this to the various buildings - the house, the storage shed and the workshop (once built).
The meter base. I color coordinated the wires from one box to the next. Absolutely don't want anything crossed or wired incorrectly.
I ended up going with 2/0 copper for this. It was a little more than the aluminum 4/0 and I'm suspecting it was easier to work with though this stuff is extremely stiff. I grounded with #4 bare copper. Not sure which was harder, driving the grounding rod 8' with an undersized hammer or digging 3 holes for our our poles and conduit in the mud. Either way, glad it's done. Now, we're waiting for the electric company to bury the power lines to the meter base. Next week, we trench our own line from the cut-off to the house, about 100'. Not looking forward to that either. It will be VERY nice to finally get to enjoy the quiet that we moved to the country for. :)
Still no sign of our Solar Panels. "They're on a truck" and should be hitting the Metroplex any day now. I've got 3 weeks to get them hooked up and verified to qualify for our $1,000 rebate from our electric company. Good thing I'm only working 8 more days this month. Really looking forward to spending some extended time off out here between now and the end of the year. I guess that's a funny statement considering that I work a lot harder out at the property than I do at my desk job.
As if to protest, our generator had a minor meltdown on Sunday. I've got 5 parts to order today to get her back up and running. Hopefully, we get to move her to backup duty pretty soon.
Saw lots of fresh deer tracks on the back part of the property when we took a walk yesterday. We took some corn and hopefully the raccoons will leave the deer some.
I checked with the local weather bureau. There's a weather station close to our property so we get pretty accurate readings. They listed 23+" (of our 63" this year) of rainfall for the combined months of September and October. I'm still fascinated (and in Awe) at the magnitude of this. I've gone through this exercise before but here it is again with current numbers:
Our 12 acres = roughly 500,000 square feet
2 feet of rainfall over 2 months x 500,000 sf = 1,000,000 cubic feet of water on our property alone
1 cubic foot of water = 7.48 gallons
1 gallon of water = 8.34 pounds
1,000,000 cubic feet of water = 7,480,000 gallons
7,480,000 gallons = 62,383,200 lbs!
Hard to fathom that we had 62+ million pounds of water fall on just our 12 acres. Our neighborhood started as a 380 acre property. It got 236,000,000 gallons of water in that same period. The 100 square miles (10 miles x 10 miles) that's within a short drive of our place got almost 40 Billion gallons of water. It's no wonder that we've had almost 10 straight months of overflow at the lake just a mile from our house. It's something to see. Day after day, month after month, it just keep pouring over the dam. I guess this wipes out the "drought" of only 29" of rainfall we got last year.
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