For the past two weekends I’ve done almost nothing but dig and fill in a trench. Said trench runs 75′ from the house to the shed in order to allow me to run electricity to the shed (and since I already did the digging, lay in a water connection as well.)
Because temps the first weekend set a record (101F with 116 Heat Index) and were only marginally better on the other days, I didn’t take a lot of photos. Here’s one photo taken when I started the dig just to get an idea of the distance. Considering that the property is a former blue stone quarry, I got pretty lucky in that only about a 30′ stretch of the 75′ had a lot of stone. That section was, obviously, the hardest – but most of the rest was just soil with a few stones here and there.
This is a totally ridiculous selfie, but I was noting that I was wearing a hat to protect from the sun, a bandana as a headband to catch some of the sweat, along with my prescription eyeglasses. This wasn’t the most comfortable thing in the world, and I had to take off my muddy gloves frequently to towel off my face and arms from all the sweat. For the most part, I worked in the early morning and the late day to avoid the peak sun. It was still terrible.
Despite my complaining here, I completed this job and got the conduit, the wiring and the water connection laid in the trench, and the trench refilled and covered. After burying the conduit, I placed some blue stone flat along the top of the trench to give an immediate indication to anyone that tries to dig there in the future. I will also be laying a bluestone and pea gravel walkway over this section as, well, a walkway from the house to the shed. However, this path will also both show the location of the conduit and mitigate the likelihood that anyone would ever dig there. The latter just being an added benefit of the former, which is my purpose.
Up next will be actually tying in the electrical sub-panel that I’m putting in the shed.