Monday, June 7, 2010

Power to the People

This is a good sign.


It is a very good sign.


It means that the tranformer and the power cables will be one.  In fact the circuit is complete to three houses.  Two more to go!


I got to satisfy my curiousity about how they hook things up inside the transformer.  No gigantic wire nuts, as I had imagined.  Instead they attach a big plug and just plug it in!
To splice into the existing underground cables, they had to dig to find the new cables and the old cables.  Given the age of the old cable and the fact that they were "hot," they did most of the digging by hand.  It was very suspenseful because although we had a genereal idea of where the cables were, we didn't know exactly.

That's why they broke out the most sophisticated technology they had:



That's right, blog fans, when you need to find something under the ground, nothing works like a pair of dowsing rods.


Here you go.  The rods have pointed toward each other.  The cable is right here.

And so it was -- more or less.


They had this nifty gadget to splice the two cables end to end.  It took a lot of cleaning and wiping and spreading special glue and crimping and twisting but in the end the old and the new were made one.

Tomorrow the splicing and empowerment for the last two houses and then down come the overhead lines and the power pole!

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