Stephen is working hard in digging the Great Hole! It is a case of doing a few hours in between rain showers and sometimes heavy ones!! But also tackling man made problems like the battery going flat on us (The infamous Dumper Incident!).
Quick before the rain comes!
The Dumper Incident or is it a Friday 13th thing??!
The Great Hole is coming so watch this space!!
Yippeee! We managed to jump start the dumper truck! We tipped the load and drove it back to the house to connect the battery charger!
Phew! That is a great releif and thanks to our cousin Neil over in Blackpool for his 20 years of expert knowledge of heavy machinery and everything with a engine in it. Cheers Neil!
OH GEE WIZ!
Our truck is broken! The starter motor is making a horrible crunching noise! Oh Blimey!
We phoned our cousin for his expert opinion and listening via our mobile phones, he recommends checking the battery charge level! The noise reminded him as if the starter motor is not quite engaging fully. The battery level was 12.2V which is rather low! We do have a solar panel mounted on the dumper truck to keep the battery charged up but we have been using it many times in the last couple of days and it has been very cloudy too! So we are not surprised that the battery is flat!! We are trying to jump start it using the mini digger to just get the truck going so we can finish emptying the load and drive it back down the slope!! Yes we are stuck half way up the slope!
We have our fingers crossed !!
We have finally settled on a design of connecting up all the earth tubes and getting the air in and out of them! We have 12 tubes all together, each one being 150mm (6inches) diameter internal) in order to provide time for the air to exchange its thermal energies with the surrounding thermal mass! The 12 tubes is equivalent to a single 600mm (2feet) diameter pipe!
After consulting with our friendly structual engineers, who advised us that our original design of using concrete blocks to construct a chimney and tunnel to pass the air down to the tubes, has potential problems at the joins due to the loading pressure from all directions but especially the sides, at 2.5m (8feet) depths! They advised the use of pre-casted concrete pipes segments to make the chimney and tunnel / chamber but this lead us to realise that we could route the tubes themselves upwards with 90degrees corners and terminate them inside the buildigs! This makes it so much easier and avoid mssing around with concrete blocks, pouring concrete around them and other reinforcing methods or drilling holes in the sides of concrete pipes!!
So Many Thank goes to our engineers at Burrell Partnerships of Norwich!!
We started digging for gold today! The 4.2m wide (over 13 feet) by 18m long (59feet) hole is quite big with a spur (like a capital L) spur for another 5m (16 feet). Oh Yes it is as deep as we can go with the digger and this is about 2.5m (8feet) down! Down! down we go! Now that’s a lot of dirt or rather in this case sand!
We discovered that the sand is quite loose and keeps collapsing into the hole so we are being careful not to get too close with the digger!
The heaps will grow and grow so we might end up blocking the camera view! Certainly the house’s windows will be completely blocked! So we are thinking of extending the pole up some extra metres to peer over!
Today we were working indoors to get out of the wet weather. We tidied up the workshop and re-assembled an old work bench. It is 12 feet long and 3 feet wide! It has loads of storage space underneath so it is now much neater and easier to get to our stuff!
We did rush out between rain showers to pick up all 100 concrete blocks to move them over to where our tunnel and chimney will be and also moved the 40 6m pipes. We did this to make room for the soil heaps which will be generated when we dig out the huge trench!
We decided to repair our temporary storage come accommodation’s roof. The wooden building is over 8 years old so the original roofing felt is cracking up! We had the job on our list of things to do and since we were waiting for our building control to approve our plan B in installing our Earth Tubes so we did the repair job instead!
We got the cheapest felt money can buy and a couple of tin of black sticky glue and got up on the roof! No Nails this time and new felt straight on top of old! It only has to last a couple of more years!
We had a flying visit from our Building Control inspector and we had a quick talk about the need to make sure the ground under and around the garage will be compacted very carefully to minimise settling effects. He was reassured that our garage slab is going to be 150mm thick and will have fibre reinforcement added. So we can now get on with the massive task of digging a large hole!
The footprint of the garage and driveway has been cleared. The top soil was removed (about 300mm, a foot) and dumped on the heap which we are now calling Mount Sod! 
Yes it is getting big! We found a old buried rubbish pile containing bones (small ones! Animal ones probably pig), very rusty tin cans, broken glass whatevers and other odds and ends!
We had nice weather (tongue in cheek) on Monday with hail, thunder and lightning! The rain fall was over 11mm in just 20minutes! The lake formed with water off the roof of our shed and water coming down the Loke. We are calling it Lake Puddle! 
The deepest job so far and probably ever, is installing the Earth Tubes! We want these to be buried as deep as possible to take advantage of the cool and almost constant thermal storage of the “earth” at those depths!
Marking out all the trench lines by banging in 25 stakes around the outside to form a cat cradle pattern!!
