Splitting Wood

I agonized to ages about whether to buy a wood splitter or not. We have quite a lot of wood to split but I wasn't sure once we'd split it how much more we would have. The smaller splitters looked too puny and the larger ones were getting big and expensive so in the ended I actually went down to the rental yard to see the size of the ones they rented. Those weren't too large to get through our fence and I could imagine getting it down to the terrace without too much trouble so we went the rental route. It was certainly the right thing to do. Unlike my chipper which I still love and use quite a lot I just don't think we have enough wood to warrant keeping a wood splitter around.

I picked up the splitter after a nice bike ride and got home and we go to work on the wood that was piled up by the wood pile. This was to get a feeling for the machine before we lowered it down to where the majority of the wood was. 15 ft down a steep incline on a terrace between our backyard and our driveway. The plan was to lower it down, split wood, and then lower it down to the driveway.

Splitting wood is a whole lot more work that you'd imagine but the big machine made it much easier to do than by hand. Lots of the wood was really rotten so crumbly to split and the majority of it was a big old pine tree I'd spent most of the spring (and many chainsaw blades blunted) cutting into split-able rounds. The grossest part was all the bugs and termites we found in the wood. The small grubs, ants and winged ants weren't so bad. What was horrible was the termite queens, they were about 4 inches long, .75 inches wide and white and wormy and stuck in these huge holes in the wood and would poke out when we split the wood. I had to poke them with a big stick and squish them until they were dead, super gross. We also found this cool huge beetle type thing what was close to death and didn't move much, poor tyke.

Getting the splitter down to the terrace was the hardest thing since we had to do it by hand, I rigged up some pulleys with a 2:1 advantage, but the splitter was at least 600lbs and difficult to move. We really wished we had some wheel chocks ready before it started going down hill, but we got there in the end. At the end of the day, lowering it down to the driveway was a doddle since we used the truck to lower it down nice and slowly. Backing up while towing was a new experience but not too traumatic and we were finally done. I estimate we split close to 2 cords of wood. Not bad for a days work. But once I was done, I was pretty done with splitting wood for a long time. I'm really glad we didn't buy one. Next time we have some trees cut down I think I'll pay extra to have them split it right here.

Bat-tacular

We were all swimming in the pool yesterday around 5pm and suddenly we spot a bat flying around. As usual it was completely silent as it swooped around. We got a great view of the bat flying around the pool as he made a few passes and then he swooped right in very low over the water, right towards me and took a little drink out of the pool! It was awesome very cool to see him up close, a little frightening that he was heading right towards me.

Obviously we didn't get any pictures since we were in the pool without our camera. But here are some pictures we took recently.

Here's a Jerusalem Cricket that Granny found in our daughter's room, right in the middle of the floor, just hanging out. Who knows how he got in there but we've found them in weird places before (once in the laundry machine).

Here's a gopher snake we saw when going for a little walk at a county park nearby. He was pretty lethargic, even though it was pretty warm outside, I guess we just didn't bother him much.

New Pool Filter

The pool's been getting grimmer and grimmer all winter long. I knew the sand needed replacing in the filter, but then the filter was starting to rust through, so I figured I'd wait until winter was over and then change it. The pool guy kept reminding me and I finally did it. I found the filter I wanted online pretty cheap and he matched the price which was nice (except for sales tax) and he delivered it, but I had to install it.

It's powered by diatomaceous earth and I found out I needed to get 6lbs of that before I could install it. So that put me back a day. There was a need to hurry you see since we had a pool play date planned with a classmate of my daughter on Sunday. I finally got it installed on Friday night, and mixed up the DE and coated the filter and had it running all night long. Here's a picture of the new filter. The pool works at a much lower pressure than it used to with the sand filter, this will put less strain on the motor so that makes me happy.

In the morning the pool was blue! It was amazing. I did some quick vacuuming up of some green algae on the bottom and it's been spotless ever since. I'm delighted!

There's a few more pictures of the old pool pump area (with a broken skimmer pump, old crappy sand filter) and the new area and a shot of inside the old sand filter over in the Photo Gallery.

It was also a bumper weekend for wildlife too. When I went to check on the pool and the filter around bedtime it was already dark and I saw a big alligator lizard under a plant. Then I saw a huge king snake that must have been over 18 inches long. Just slinking along across our driveway. Also last week I found a huge black widow spider in the garage, just hanging out on one of the cabinet doors. The spiders have been going crazy recently with the super hot weather, and heading into the house, we've chucked out lots this week. We catch and release ALL spiders around here, even the black widows. We also finally got a pretty o.k. picture of a blue tailed skink, he was hanging out by the back door in the sun.

This afternoon I patched a few holes in the driveway and while I was doing it there was another 2ft long king snake on the hill by the driveway, he even rattled his tail at me! When I got wifey to come look at him she noticed there were TWO of them on the same hill and they weren't the same one we'd seen the other night!

The pool is warm enough

The weather's been lovely for 2 days, the water has been circulating around the solar panels for a week and today the pool is officially warm enough to swim in. It was great!

Not much else been happening around the house. I've been working on clearing out the brush down on the terrace behind the pool, it's slow going when you can only chip wood with the wood chipper when my daughter is awake. There's also a huge old rotten log that's about 3 ft in diameter I'm slowly working my way through to get out of the way. I'm trying to get the whole area ready for her to explore around and perhaps make some swings in the big trees and perhaps a tree house and also my big goals for a huge deck at BOTH ends of the pool, but that mostly depends on if we're going to remodel the house or not.

Soon it's going to be time to install a new pool filter which is going to be a big adventure.

I guess it doesn't look like we'll get much more measurable rain so I'll document how much rain we got so far this year: 32 inches. not bad, but nothing compared to the 60 inches we got a few years ago.

Chip it, Chip it good!

Three or four years ago we borrowed the wood chipper of a coworker of my wife. It was awesome, it was one of those teeny gas powered ones but I managed to get a lot of brush cleared and
didn't have to try and cram the sticks into a yard waste bin. Since then I've wanted one of my own, but I've been paralyzed with reviewer dread. All the reviews of wood chippers I was interested in (around $700) said they sucked. Then I found the bear cat ones, that reviewed very well and were quite a bit more expensive. Well I got one and finally got to use it this weekend; It rocked! It was very powerful, chipped logs larger than I felt comfortable feeding into it and also seemed relatively quiet, although that might be the peltor ear guards I got. Anyway, now I'm looking all around for other things to chip. I'm trying to clear a path down to the terrace so I can get the chipper down there and really start chipping up a storm.

Crazy Storm

We just recovered from a super crazy storm! We got over 10 inches of rain including 7" in just one day. The rain, rain, rain came down, down, down in rushing rising rivulets! and the wind huffed and puffed but did not blow our house down. The wind did blow down a big tree in our neighbors yard, mercifully it only crushed their cyclone fence and blocked the driveway a bit. They cleared it out so we could pass and then cleared it properly 2 days later. I did go down to help them clear it, but I fired up my chainsaw and realized my chain was blunt, so went back to the house to put a new chain on, finally found it and installed it and by the time I got back it was raining and they were almost done (whee!).

We lost power early on in the storm and didn't get it back for around 60 hours. It worked out pretty good now we have our generator but since it's so small we can't use the generator for our electric stove or our electric hot water. Boiling water on the wood stove is kinda easy and we took a trip into wifey's office to take a shower which worked out well. Baby was running around the office completely starkers, good job it was the weekend! We had the status number on speed dial and called often, it's maddening to have the time to restoration keep being pushed back and last we heard they said they'd have more info Wednesday, so I didn't even flip the switch to have the power come back on during the night, then I call at 2AM on Monday morning to see if thy have a new estimate and the robot asks me what kind of outage I have. Oh joy! I run out to flip the big switch and sure enough, we have power! It's such a great feeling to have made it through another outage and we're getting so good at it now it's starting to feel less like a big deal. One of our faraway neighbors still had their generator running well into the next day, I wonder if they too really had power, but just didn't know it yet?

I found myself pondering the problem that the electric company has to solve when scheduling the crews to fix the outages, I imagine it's a pretty interesting problem and wonder how automated it is? You need to get the most people online as quickly as possible but need to factor in access to the places to fix, how easy they are to fix and also merge in incoming outage information too, fascinating!

In other news, the initial pool work was done and turned out cheaper than expected and looks awesome, I'm very, very happy with it! I pulled out all the old conduit and it looks much tidier now. I'm going to wait until winter is over before replacing the filter. I might even do that myself now the hard work is done. I don't think we'll even end up getting a pool sweep installed, but it's always an option.

Pool Work

It's been a long time since I blogged here, sorry. Not much has been going on with the house since the spawn arrived since she's been keeping us rather busy. Mostly it's been reactionary stuff when things break and I can't even remember anything breaking seriously enough to warrant much attention (we've been lucky!). About a month ago, the pool pump just kept stopping and tripping the circuit breaker, after a quick afternoon of diagnosis I worked out it was a short in the conduit that leads down from our main panel down to the pool pump (about 50 ft). It could have been worse, I might not have been able to find the problem, but at least I did, but sadly it's a long piece of wire underground. I quickly botched something together using the very thick old wire that used to power our well pump (replaced with the new pump (in 2003 I think)) and promised myself I would talk to the pool guy about it and also talk to an electrician about getting it fixed. Then I got busy at work and the pool guy called and asked why I was trying to kill him and I finally got to calling an electrician to come fix it.

You see I have grand plans for that end of the pool. When we moved in there were two really old rusty intermatic boxes with old mechanical timers in there, the one for the pump worked, the other one for the pool light never did work. When the timer finally gave up the ghost I found a really slick digital one on line for only twice the price of the mechanical one. I got it, I love it. The best thing is that it keeps time for 8 hours during a power outage which is kinda critical where we live. It bothered me it was installed in this crappy old rusty box, but I just couldn't find a new box on line and it was more work than I wanted to replace it anyway. At some point my plan is to have a nice big deck at that end of the pool too, just like at the other end, but it will be more private and have a bench that covers up the pool pump and filter.

Anyway so when talking to one electrician he came up with the genius idea of moving the timers to the side of the house and only running conduit down to the pool pump and everything will be simpler and only 15 ft of conduit to bury. Lovely! I got back to thinking of those crappy old boxes and moving them to the side of the house and searched in earnest and found a beautiful double timer box for not much more than a single box and it came with two timers, which I could keep as spares in case my digital one ever broke, or I wanted to time more high voltage motors to come on. Why am I blogging about this? because it worries me the kind of pride and joy this new timer box brings me and how excited I am to see it finally installed on the side of the house and to tidy up some of the pool wiring. I'll post before and after pictures once it's done.

After the electrical is done, I need to replace the pool filter too. The Pool guy is heavily pushing a DE filter which he says will be awesome and I've found it cheaper online, I'm seriously considering trying to install it myself and cleaning up more stuff around there while I'm at it (like taking out the old busted pool sweep motor).