MAKING OUR OWN GRID - Utility Holes for the Airstream Carport (Step 7)

Welcome back to our airport project. If you're just joining us, we are building a permanent structure for our renovated vintage Airstream. Aka our tiny shiny home. Yes, this is where we live right now as we're building our homestead from the ground up here in Arizona. We're in pretty deep at this point. We've poured a pad, we put the building up, we even did something else that I can't remember. We put in gutters and downspouts. Now let's talk about utility holes. Don't ask us about our holes. We are going to tell you. Guys, these holes are for utilities. Just because we're off-grid doesn't mean we don't have water or power. Still need to connect stuff, especially for a permanent trailer site. It's true. But it does mean we're about to turn the ground around this building into Swiss cheese. Here's a list of the things that we need to run. 3,000 gallon water catchment tank. This will be partially buried for temperature regulation and a lower drop height to help with our wet delivery gutter system. So we need an eight foot by eight foot hole three feet down. A pump house. Yes, we are on version three of our solar water pump house with even more upgrades. All we need hole-wise for this is a pipe running out of the big tank underground to where the pump house will be. Gray water septic. I know you have so many questions already, but be patient. Coming in a video soon, all you need to know right now is that it's four foot by three foot hole. It's about five feet deep. We also need a solar conduit trench. Future plans will most likely include using this roof to house additional solar panels. So we're thinking ahead and trenching from the northeast corner to our solar array where we have two empty spaces on our combiner box. This will be a 70 foot run, two feet deep. And finally, we want permanent AC power coming from our solar shed. This is a 120 foot run and also two feet deep, but we won't get into that in today's video. We are definitely not digging all these holes by hand. We are bringing in our neighbor Jason to help us with this project. All right, so we got a little bit further that we need to dig this trench to our solar array so that we can lay conduit, get this back filled, and be able to move the truck over to our hole where our water tank will go. So lots left to do. Here we go. You want to explain what we're doing here? I can try to explain what we're doing. The outlet of the water tank is at the bottom. And so we're going to be coming out of that and then underground to our water pump house. It's all going to stay underground so it doesn't freeze. And we're going to try to put in a couple of these access boxes on the way down so we can still get to the ball valve if we need to for whatever reason. So that means that this eight foot square isn't quite wide enough for those to fit. So we're going to notch this out and then we've got to figure out some way to trench across here at 18 inches down because that's the frost line. And then pop it back up inside where the tank, not tank, the pump house is going to go. Swiss cheese. It's like Swiss cheese over here. But you're in the shade. I am in the shade right now. And you look good. I'm thinking I should at least come into like, at least there just to have room to make all the connections. Babe, if you hit that flag, I'm going to be so mad. Just a flag, babe. No, don't do that. What's it going to do, babe? Let's not have any maiming accidents with the pickaxe. Getting close. That's where we got to go. Okay, I can't see, but we're going to start running conduit from this corner of the airstream cover, the airport, to our solar panel array. The reason for that is, is at some point in the future, we plan to put a few more solar panels on the roof of this building, connect it into that solar panel array because we have some open spots available. We're not going to do that as part of this main project, but while we have everything dug up, we're going to go ahead and at least put the conduit in and then cover it back up. We have run all the conduit. We'll run the wire later. So it's time to fill this trench back in so we can pull the truck in, put the pea gravel in the hole for the water tank. It's like, it's like a puzzle you have to put together one piece at a time. And this is the next piece. So let's go. Holy cow. Next step. We got a bunch of pea gravel and it's been sitting in the back of our truck for two days. It's like 2000 pounds. Let's get it out of here. And we're going to get it on the bottom of this. And so that we can, this is where the water tank goes. Yeah. So you want small rocks underneath your water tank that aren't sharp so that it can level itself as it gets filled up and those rocks won't make holes in the bottom. Yeah. Is that it? Yeah. That's it. It's late. Let's get this done. I'll tell you what, I'm so glad to be back down in the dirt and not up in the scissor lift. Yeah. Things are moving much faster now that we're down on the ground and the kids are able to help a lot more with this project. So what's next? Well, we have a bunch of holes we need to fill with stuff. We'll see you then.