21 June 2018

Made my daily stop at Green Mountain Electric where, for a whopping 69 cents, the good folks there sold me the special reducing washers needed to create a 1¼″ hole from a 1¾″ electrical panel knockout.  Problem solved!  They also sold me the special frost-heave sleeve that I needed for the conduit because, believe it or not, the ground does move up and down quite a bit hereabouts in the winter.  Spent much of the afternoon moving stone, by hand, from point A to point B putting the finishing touches on the compacted stone base for the barn foundation.  Called and left a message with Long Ridge Concrete that we’re now officially ready for their ministrations.  In case you didn’t know, it’s a lot easier to compact stone with a gasoline-powered plate compactor than it is with a manually operated 8″ hand tamp.  After the foundation stone base was done (and a thing of beauty it surely is), went to put the last few pieces in the 1″ PVC electrical conduit.  Even though my measurements showed that I might have just enough conduit, rather than take a chance of being royally screwed if I was wrong on the short side, I cleverly inserted an old 7½″ piece of PVC left over from a previous project.  But doing that used up my last coupling, which meant I was one coupling short when I went to put in the final piece.  And, don’t you know, after cutting that last piece I ended up with 8″ of left over conduit, so, if I had trusted my measurements, I would have had exactly the right amount of materials to finish the job.  Grrrr!  Chree and I sucked a string through the conduit and then pulled a rope through, said rope to be used to pull the 4 AWG wire that eventually will provide power to the barn electrical subpanel.