Site Work
June 23
The excavator, finally showed up. He was pretty much on schedule. The company is Depco, out of Green Village. The owner, PJ Depoortere, is a fraternity brother of mine from NJIT Pi Kappa Phi.
He dropped off a big backhoe and made short work of taking down the carport walls, and moving the logs out of the way.
With the old stuff out of the way, I laid out the dig lines for the footings. It took a while because none of the existing house walls are square with each other.
Note the white markings indicating my sewer line beneath. I will keep my fingers crossed hoping that the backhoe doesn't break it while digging.
Guess what- they dug up the sewer line.
On Wednesday July 5th, I was still on vacation and the weather was really hot. I decided to re-connect the central air condensing unit in a temporary location in front of the house. I rerouted the 2 freon lines from the furnace out the front instead of the back. I was able to do this without breaking the lines on the furnace. The compressor side has flair nut connections, 3/8" liquid, and 3/4" suction.
The Depco workers also started digging the same day with the backhoe. I was keeping an eye on them when they were near the sewer location. Midday I had to go out to pick up some silver solder and compressor oil for the a/c unit. When I returned, one of the workers told me that they hadn't found the sewer line yet, but they did find a footing drain and dug up a 15' piece of it. Part was 4" clay and the other part was 4" cast iron. I asked them why they thought it was a footing drain and they didn't know. To test their theory I flushed the toilet upstairs, and water came out of the pipe on the house side. After all my warnings and paint markings they had dug up my house sewer line.
The remaining pipe had rough ends which needed to be cut clean. I went to Taylor Rental to rent a diamond blade cut saw, and stopped at the hardware store for some couplings and 4" PVC pipe. The workers split at 4:00pm and I didn't finish fixing the pipe until after 6:00pm.
Thursday July 6th, I decided to stay home again so that I could continue to relocate the condensing unit, and try to prevent the diggers from breaking anything else. To continue with the condensing unit installation, I decided to connect the freon lines first, and then work on the electric. My flair tool could make the small flair, but not the large one. I couldn't buy or borrow a 3/4" flair tool, so I wound up soldering the old large end back on. I remounted the electric box and rerouted the electric wire. The next step is to evacuate the system with a vacuum pump that I borrowed from work, check for leaks, and fill it back up with freon. I connected my refrigeration gauges to the unit, but when I tried to attach the hose to the vacuum pump, there was a fitting missing. I was also low on vacuum pump oil. After acquiring the needed supplies, I attached the vacuum pump and pulled the system down to 29" of mercury vacuum and held it for 30 minutes. When I shut off the pump, the vacuum held which meant that there were no leaks!
I then connected the filling line to the tank of freon, R-22, and opened the valves to pressurize the system. I turned the unit on and continued to add freon until the gauges read the correct pressures. How did I know what pressure? I called an HVAC guy that I knew and asked him. Click here to find out. Those of you who are not interested would probably want to skip this part, but the a/c works!
Meanwhile the diggers have finished about 75% of the first pass of removing material. I decided that I needed to make up an elevation detail showing them how deep to dig.
Friday July 9th- 3days excavation work
By Friday July 16th the excavators were done. It took a total of 8 days of backhoe work digging hard rocky material from this mountain top.
