Diggin’ a hole

Today, we dug out the trench for the new pipe to go to the cabin at the back for the new solar hot water system.

We managed to get the trench dug out, I thought it’d take most of the weekend to get it right, but after smashing out the concrete with a sledge hammer and breaking out the pavers, the ground breaking ceremony began.

The trench has to be a minimum of 200mm deep, so we’ve aimed for that for the full length, and I’ve aimed to keep it as straight as possible, because if the plumber wants to use copper pipe (or anything that won’t bend easy), it’ll be difficult to get the right angle. What we’ve done is come off the house straight for about 1m, and then diagonally across the yard for about 7m.

After we started the angle, we found a bit of material that looked like brick, some careful prodding revealed the sewer line, and it sits at a wonderful 150mm – right in the way of the trench. So, we’ve allowed 300mm – one of the pipes is going to have to move, and I’ll assume it won’t be the sewer.

We continued digging out further, and come across another pipe – thin, doesn’t really make sense as to were it goes, as it’s many meters away from the cabin, and seems to come off from the house. Perhaps it’s the drain from the Kitchen or something.. Anyway, it’s higher than the sewer, so we can work around that.

Next, continue digging and find a tree root as thick as conduit. We let it live, it’s not in the way.

We approach closer to the granny flat, and run into cold water pipes, at about 150mm, and about 50mm below them is a 100mm thick storm water drain. It’s at this point that we attempt to consider how on earth the plumber is going to reach the hot water pipe anyway. The walls on the cabin are fibro, behind the ‘landing’ area for the new pipe is the bathroom basin, so that’s the closest point to get the hot water into the cabin – the problem is, how is the pipe going to get past the mess that sits in the way of it’s finishing spot, and how is it going to get into the granny flat.

One scenario – pull out the basin, to find the pipe for hot water, punch out from there, add a T-join to the pipe, and then feed that through under the storm water drain (meaning we now have to go 500mm or so deeper I think).

The other, use poly pipe which can bend and flex around the spaghetti mess in the way, and feed that into the granny flat, through the wall into the hot water pipe. Remove the hot water system and cap off the plumbing.

Still, that means punching one hole through as there is no external pipe for them to get to.

Tuesday will be interesting, as the cabin will either have hot water, or we’ll need to sort out something else to get it hot water from the new system, and also of interest is how hot the water will actually be, that will give us an idea of how effective it is.

One of the issues lately has been the rain, it’s been overcast and rainy a lot lately…

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