Sometimes it’s sorta like painting-lots of tedious prep for a short bit of actual work.
Anyway, first we had to load the spools up onto our spool jacks, and while most of the wire in the picture is smaller-there’s a #6 ground and six #10 PV wires-those are big spools.
There’s 16,000 feet of wire on those spools. 😬
We were happy to have the excavator on hand to help us move and lift these.
Still, you can’t totally avoid having to manhandle these and by the time this was all rigged up we’d had quite the workout.
Then it was back over to our old stomping grounds-the array pad.
You can see the equipment pad some 300’ in the background on the left.
Our tugger is designed to be portable and it’s on a hand truck-but for all that it’s still heavy, awkward and a pain to load in and out of the truck-unless you’ve got a crane. 😊
Denise gets the short end of this stick-she has to pull the wire off the spools and guide it all into the conduit.
It’s a surprisingly tough job. There’s a lot of weight and friction in those spools. It’s a real workout.
I generally run the tugger.
While less physically demanding, it takes a practiced hand to manage rope feed rates and tension to prevent breaking the rope or damaging other things.
Our wireless headsets keep us in constant hands free communication and are a tremendous asset here.
And with that-our first, and one of the more difficult-wire pulls on this job is complete.
Now it’s lunch time!