[Previous entry: "More Baby Pictures"] [Next entry: "Critter Tales and More"]

07/03/2007: "One Step Forward"

As Channa mentioned just prior to the calf postings, we have had Progress on the battery system that stores energy from the photovoltaic panels. This photo shows me looking pretty grateful to have completed this little subproject of pouring a reinforced floor in the shed strong enough to hold up the weight of the lead acid batteries, which weigh an astounding 1100 pounds! (Consider for a moment that all that expense and weight and effort is necessary to hold about five dollars worth of electricity at current prices, and you get some sense of how cheap energy is in our current daily life).

This project of replacing the shed floor took a lot more effort than I had expected. My original plan was to stash the batteries in the basement, but even that was going to take some time and expense; they would have needed to be on some sort of raised platform to avoid the occasional flooding that occurs in the cellar during the winter, and this would also have required long expensive electrical cables from the inverter. Pat, the electrician, suggested that the batteries could be put in the shed that adjoins the house; I could see immediately that this made sense because the cables would be short, but it came with a challenge: the wood floor, though hefty for a shed, would not support the weight of the batteries.



I started the demolition phase of this project on the trip that Nate and I helped Pat pull the wire through the conduit (back in early June). The difficulty of removing the floor was that for once, something at the farm was built better than expected! Pat loaned me his Sawzall to make the initial cuts, and after an hour of work I had barely lifted one board. Sixteen-penny nails driven into treated wood have a death grip, it turns out.



I spent a second trip to the farm in mid-June just working on getting the rest of the floor out. I had brought down a load of gravel that I had picked up for free from a neighbor in Portland, along with the brand-new cement mixer still in its carton; the first thing I did was unload the gravel into handy five gallon buckets that Nate supplied.



Because the shed had been built on top of a completed floor, it was tricky getting the floor out from under the studs. Once the floor was more-or-less removed I contemplated the soil under the floor: it was soft and fluffy, almost like sawdust everywhere. I figured that I had to remove this soil before pouring concrete, or else the soil would compress and the concrete would crack. The soil question stumped me; why wasn't it hardpan clay like the rest of Oregon? I fetched Nate and asked him for his opinion. Together we sifted through the soil, noting that there were voids in the soil. Nate noticed the half shell of a walnut; suddenly he remembered how he had heard squirrels running around in the shed last winter. He had thought that they had been tree squirrels, but now it was evident that these had been ground squirrels, and the soil area under the shed was their nest! The squirrels were long gone, now, however.

So now I had to figure out how far down to excavate to get past the ground squirrel nest voids. I started hauling out buckets of fluffy dift. It was hard work filling them in the enclosed space of the shed, wearing a dustmask against possible Hanta virus. Five buckets, ten buckets, fifteen buckets of dirt. As of ten pm I had been working for six hours, but it was time to go home; I loaded the cement mixer carton into the truck again, and then drove home.

I came back again with my daughters the next weekend, determined to push this project to completion. I spent the Saturday afternoon assembling the cement mixer; it looked sericeable, but apparently someone in the Chinese factory had been sloppy about counting fasteners, as I was short two bolts. Nate and Channa were off on a hike, so I knocked off early to make dinner of tofu stir-fry, and after dinner Nate made a fire so we could toast some marshmallows. It got cold around the fire.



The girls and I bedded down in the Cat Free Zone (Rebecca's room) for the night, and the next morning we all went out to the William L. Finley wildlife refuge to look at aboriginal savannahs and habitat. I took photos and made recordings of Nate's very informed comments, but for me the thing that stood out was how tasty the ripe blue serviceberries were! On our way back through town I picked up the missing bolts at a hardware store, and then I was set to try and finish the floor.

I had paid to have some three quarter minus gravel delivered during the intervening week, since I had decided that the free gravel wasn't going to make a strong enough bed for the concrete (the free gravel was more like drainage gravel, all large pieces; what you want for underlayment is crushed gravel that will fill all the voids and interlock). So, I hauled a few more buckets of dirt out of the shed, then started ferrying buckets of gravel into the shed. It took about sixteen or seventeen buckets to fill the hole up, and then it was time to start tying in the rebar.





Then we got busy with the cement mixer. Having just completed a similar concrete pour in Portland for our chicken coop, I was eager to see whether a cement mixer would make a job easier and faster. We found that we could get two 60 pound bags of cement mixed in each batch.



This was an all-hands-on-deck sort of project; Channa had the important job of poking the newly dumped concrete to work the bubbles out, while Nate and I took turns holding bags over the mouth of the mixer while the other person slit the bag to release the mix. Thankfully, my daughters found ways to amuse themselves without supervision in the orchard.



And so, late in the afternoon we finished the job. I would say that even with the mixer doing two bags at once it didn't go twice as fast as doing it a bag at a time in a wheel barrow, which is the way that I did it in Portland. However, the effort was significantly less.

This whole sub-project brought a couple of things into sharp focus for me. One is that it takes an immense amount of effort to do seemingly simple infrastructure tasks. This whole photovoltaic project has been going on for seven months, with turn-on just tantalizingly around the corner. It's easy to think that preparing for a low energy future involves just buying things: seeds, hoes, well components, cart, rototiller, five gallon buckets, milking supplies and buckets, and on and on. However, it also takes perseverance: perseverance to clear fence lines, perseverance to go out and milk the cow even when you don't feel like it, perseverance to replant a section of the garden that didn't do well the first time around, perseverance to work late into the night filling a five gallon bucket with fluffy, rodent poop-laden dirt.

The other thing that has been going through my mind is how much of the farm can be saved. You read that right, saved. My friend Bobby offered me a chance to buy some wood from his land in Washington at a good price, so I said yes to buying a thousand board feet for a couple of hundred dollars. It's a good deal, and most of it will go toward re-siding the shop, which is our most functional (and secure) outbuilding. Some of it will go for residing the south side of the barn.



However, the south side of the barn is the third biggest problem with the barn: the number one problem is the foundation, which is badly affected by poor drainage and in danger of buckling, and the number two problem is the roof, which despite eight thousand dollars in repairs two years ago still leaks. Nate and I had some very serious discussions about the structures of the farm after the kids had gone to bed and the two of us were sitting around the fire in the pit of the orchard. We don't know whether we'll be able to save the barn; it needs either a lot of money or a lot of material and time, and my sense is that we may not have that. We also discussed the house, which seems to have drainage issues of its own, and which last year took four cords of wood to heat. Even our seven acre woodlot can't sustain four cords a year, so something has to change. For now, though, I guess we'll just have to settle for having made this one small step forward by completing the shed floor.