Monday morning had us loading up the F-350 with another round of parts and hoping to not repeat last Mondays round of BS.
So far, it wasn’t looking really promising, as a critical batch of parts that we needed that was supposed to be delivered last Friday never showed up, so it was one of the first things we would have to straighten out.
Denise drove the first leg of the trip from Fort Rock to Seligman so I could get on the computer and attempt to catch this story up. I was partially successful despite the ever so rough I-40 making typing near impossible.
After a stop in Seligman for breakfast we then went to Ashfork for fuel. Then I made some phone calls to confirm that, indeed, our critical parts had somehow never even shipped. A few more phone calls, emails, and texts got the parts redirected to a location closer to the job.
Hopefully. LOL.
I drove the rest of the way to camp.
I tried to get some pictures of the winding road up the mountain. They don’t really do justice to it.
Once you leave the main road, there is still a couple miles of tight winding blacktop, then you drop into some pretty forest roads.
Finally, we were at the gate to camp. Good thing we had the keys!
Once at Camp DRE, we unloaded the truck, took care of a couple emails and phone calls, then jumped right back into the project to make sure we didn’t have another Monday.
That was short lived. We almost immediately discovered that the wall they had built for our equipment wasn’t the 8 feet tall it appeared to be that we require in our contract. A bunch of blue tape on the wall is how we mock up all the gear, and we attempted to try and make this short wall work-but no dice.
So it was a meeting with the camp people to tell them they need to redo the wall. Stat.
That wrecked the days work plans of setting up the inverter room layout, so we had to regroup and figure out how to keep moving forward.
Denise tackled assembling the battery racks.
And I took on the unenviable and inevitable task of figuring out the final details of integrating a new power system into a very old wiring and distribution system. Given the age and location, it was no real surprise to find a lot of-shall we say creative? -wiring here.
First, on the new side, I have to figure out how to deal with these conduit stub up someone else did. I wish this picture did justice to how crooked and messed up these are. Half in and half out of the wall. One is so crooked it’s practically pointing at the adjacent wall. They aren’t deep enough, so I’ve got a bell end on one and a coupler on another to contend with. The sweeps are 2 ½” but the conduit is only 2”-so that’s a big can of worms. It’s crazy how much someone who doesn’t do stuff like this for a living can so miserably screw up such a simple thing. They tried, and thought they were doing good, but… Sigh.
Then I was on to mapping out the existing electrical system at my tie in points so I can make sure I get everything hooked up and connected safely. There was some good stuff to be found. LOL.
I was actually pleasantly surprised to find terminal blocks in this gutter!
Just about everything else is a living nightmare for a professional electrician with a small case of OCD.😬😬
At the end of the day, things didn’t go how we wanted them, and we had a few issues, but it was a total walk in the park compared to last Monday and we did make good progress, we are gonna call this day a win.
Suck it, Monday!