Roselea

Category: Groundworks

  • Earth Tubes Plan B – Day 5

    The growing and unstoppable hole continues .. .. We are nearly there! Does anyone want some nice soft sand? Going cheap! Just bring your own 20ton lorry!

    Day 5 – Sunday 15th August

    The main part of the backwards “L” is done today. Just the little spur to do tomorrow!
    picture of the large hole
    The dumper truck is holding well, no sign of the flat battery problem but the level, at the end of the day, was 12.91V which it is a bit low. Again it has been cloudy today compared with yesterday. Yesterday the voltage was a good 13.5V and there were much more loads to move and hence more starts! But it was glorious sunny weather! So the solar panel does do a good job even though it is only rated at 1.5W!

  • Earth Tubes Plan B – Day 4

    With the newly energised Dumper Truck (the battery is now fully charged!) Stephen dashed out to do as possible before the forecasted heavy rain comes!! guess What? No Rain! Stephen worked all day and we counted 36 loads dugs out! Phew!

    Day 4 – Saturday 14th August

    Lovely day with both the weather and the amount of work done!

    It’s time to go around the bend tomorrow! The spur of the L is next!
    the hole at the end of day 4
    The pile of stuff dug out.

  • Earth Tubes Plan B Day 2 and 3

    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!).

    Day 2 – Thursday 12th August

    Quick before the rain comes!

    Day 3 – Friday 13th August

    The Dumper Incident or is it a Friday 13th thing??!

    The Great Hole is coming so watch this space!!

  • Earth Tubes Design Conclusion!

    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!!

  • Earth Tubes Plan B Day 1

    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!

    Day 1 – Wednesday 11th August

    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!

  • Earth Tubes Day 1

    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!

    Day 1 – Friday 6th August

    Marking out all the trench lines by banging in 25 stakes around the outside to form a cat cradle pattern!!

    The strings showing where the earth tubes will go

  • Mass Wall Foundation Day 1 & 2

    The Ground Work now commences for the Garage! We are putting in a Mass Wall foundation to hold back the soil and stabilise the concrete fence posts.

    Day 1 – Saturday 24th July

    Finished clearing the area. Recycled old timber (2 by 2s) and shelves to make moulds to create the segments for fixing the fence posts. They are elongated hexagon shapes 775mm wide by 300mm thick and 775mm deep (of which 325mm is visible above ground and 450mm buried down to the frost free zone).Showing the shape of the forms

    Day 2 – Sunday 25th July

    Finished the other 2 moulds. Started with Posts G1, G4 and G7 (numbered from the shed to the compost heap) to dig out the soil for placing the moulds in.

     Form in place around a fence post

    Mixed up just over 5 bags of cement and heaps of ballast to make the concrete and poured it in the three moulds!

    Form filled with concrete

    We will wait and see if we can get the moulds off later when concrete is set!!

  • Tidy Up and bits and pieces

    Today we filled in the old septic tank with soil to make it safe for the time being (we don’t need to dig it up until we are prepareing the ground for foundations for the main house). Started clearing the left part of the site ready for the garage (out of camera angle). The dumper truck had a check over and a couple of old rubber fuel lines were replaced and tyres pumped up.
    Had a delivery of a strange object. It was about 3 feet high by a foot diameter, it had a foam material wrapped around the bottom and funnel like top to it! Most Strange! It will be collected tomorrow and delivered to the correct destination somewhere in Norfolk!

    Day 3 – Wednesday 21st July

    Old tank filled in!

  • Old Septic Tank Decommission Day 2

    We Are Live! The sewage is now successfully running to our new sewage processing unit. The Man and His Tanker came this morning and sucked every last bit of … umm … that smelly stuff out!

    the empty septic tank
    We carefully removed the end of the tank away from the old clay pipe and connected a rubber adapter to the standard plastic pipe going to the new processing unit.

    the temporary sewer connection

    Day 2 – Tuesday 20th July

    Phew! Now we can go and use the toilets again!!

  • Old Septic Tank Decommission Day 1

    We have started the decommissioning process on the old septic tank. A large and smelly quantity of the semi clear waste was pumped into the new sewage processor tank, using a drill pump. It was slow (it said it could do over 1000 litres per hour) but we probably had it going in total for several hours!! We then cleaned the pipes from the buildings and we are ready for the Sewage Man and his Tank to come and pump the rest out!

    Day 1 – Sunday 18th July

    (I hope he comes in time, We have our legs crossed!)