Archive for October, 2006

Today was my first day that I had to rake my enormous oak tree laden hell yard.

Here’s the before:

And here’s the after:

Pretty good job, eh?? Rake courtesy of John Deere.
After I finish doing all this, I look up into the heavens…

And realize that mother nature hasn’t even started raining her leafy terror on my yard.? There are just too many leaves up there.? I have a feeling I’m getting pwned.

Over the weekend we went from 100 to 200 amps. This was partly for safety reasons, and so that in the future when we want to add new stuff (like a microwave range and a hot tub or whatever) we have enough circuits. The old circuit breaker:

A bit of a mess. It wasn’t properly grounded, and it was WAY to close to the oil tank.

The new circuit breaker had to be moved about 5 feet to the right.

The old breaker is gone, replaced with some boxes to extend the existing ancient cables. I’m not concerned about the age of the old cables, 50’s era armored BX cable is good stuff, should last forever.

The new circuit breaker. We have TONS of unused breakers we can use now.

New jump installed across the water meter.

Outside, the place where the old meter was is now exposed. I didn’t know this, but it looks like the old house was painted cedar siding. Now it’s all vinyl (thank god). Not sure how I’m going to clean this up.

The new enormous meter outside. Note the lack of an actual meter counter doohickey. CL+P installs that this week sometime. For now, I guess I get free power. Also note that the master shutoff for the circuit breaker is actually underneath the meter, outside. I guess they did this because the master shutoff can only be a few feet from the outside meter, and we’re now over that limit. The national electric code is so weird…