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!!
Started the day by doing a repair on the digger which I had been meaning to do for ages. The switch which allows the boom to be swiveled side to side relative to the cab hasn’t worked for ages. Fixed it but it took hours… Then back to the soil moving.
Oops! I bent the wheelbarrow which was leaning against the bank (the boundary between us and school) and backed the dumper truck into it!
Last bit of soil removal and a bit of a tidy up. Then we could start marking out where the earth tube tenches will go. 25 stakes later a cats cradle was born…
Started moving the top soil to our spoil heap at the top of the garden. Just load and dump over and over again…
The next job is to clear the area for the garage, earth tubes, rainwater tanks and soak away. We need to remove the top soil over the area from the fence to the loke.
Remove paving slabs from in front of the old shed doors. Then at 12:30 Rain stopped play (oops I mean Work!), a nice summer thunderstorm of rain and hail which droped 11mm of rain in 15 minutes! Then the rain set in for the rest of the day…
Yippee the mass wall is now finished ..
I think this the the hardest thing we have done so far (a foretaste of things to come).
Here are some statistics – 11m long, 300mm wide and 775mm high (2.6 cubic meters). This required us to dig nearly 4 cubic meters of soil out (50 wheel barrow loads). The concrete was made with 35 bags of cement (nearly a ton) and over 200 buckets of sand and stones and it weighs over 6 tons!
And now watch it all in 2 minutes
The weather is much nicer for our last two days of working and building our Mass Wall Foundation!
The next two segments between the posts were done today. We didn’t start until the afternoon and getting the formwork in place, took a bit of fiddling. We created a collection of wooden wedges to help jam in the formwork against the heavy weight of the concrete (we discovered that the top edge especially was suffering) and the wedges did help even though we had to put in a flat board behind the wedges as well to stop them digging into the soil! So we didn’t finished the concrete production until 7:30pm!
The final day is here! At last! well only for our mass wall! We extended the formwork by joining together the other two straight pieces. It is now 3.6metres long (12feet) as the last segment we decided to do in one go! We reinforced the top edge to stop it from bulging out with the weight (over one and a half tons) of concrete! The wedges are working very nicely indeed now especially if we use a flat board to spread the load on the soft soil.
Well That’s That! PHEW!
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!
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.
Phew! Now we can go and use the toilets again!!
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!
(I hope he comes in time, We have our legs crossed!)
Here is the quick Review movie of installing our Sewage Processor unit and its immediate connections!
And Hey Presto…. one very clean Sewage Treatment processing unit is done and dusted!
The final day, well not quite but near enough as the air is now pumping into the processor very nicely!
Cut a narrow trench for conduit holding the air pipe from our temporary building to the processor. 
We were interrupted for half an hour by the sharp thunder storm (10:45am). Filled the trench and also finished filling over the processor unit with soil to the metal cover level. Added two more 3metre segments with a 90 degrees bend up! Filled in the Trench so we can get the car out again!!
That’s That done! Now for the smelly job .. .. diverting the old pipes and connecting them into the new marvellous processing system!