Getting Electricity

You might remember last February when we hurried to dig a 3 foot deep trench for our underground power line so we wouldn't have to cut down a beautiful big tree and clear a twenty foot wide easement through the trees that form our natural privacy fence.

Two months later Florida Power and Light said they were ready to bring the power onto our property. We quickly dug our new trench from where the transformer will be to the house. Doesn't Oliver have a great way to check if it is exactly two feet deep?

The next day, subcontractors for FPL appeared to bore under the road and our trees to connect to the electrical conduit we had buried two months earlier. First they bored from our new telephone pole under the road, our drainage ditch, and our trees to where our buried conduit ended.

Then they pulled the tube for the electrical line back to the other side.

The following week, another set of subcontractors came to connect their newly bored conduit to the one we had buried months earlier, use high pressure to send a weight through the newly connected conduit under the trees and the road to the power pole and then pull back the electrical line. They then pounded in a 30 foot copper ground wire and went home.

The next day the same crew brought the slab for the transformer and the transformer and another crew attached the electrical wires and powered everything up at the pole on the street.

The transformer is now live with electricity. Now we have to wait for another crew to put in a temporary pole so the workers can use the electricity rather than our generator to build our house.