The first thing I did was fire up the generator. The cord was long enough that I can leave it all the way out by the grill. Which is good because I don't think I quite realized just how loud the generator is.
One of the common complaints with the cords was that they didn't lock. Mine seemed ok. Not great, but ok.
I turned on all the circuits except for the well.
This is the first time I have gotten to fire up the heat pump. It came right on.
Things started going downhill after that. I switched it to heat.
The generator handled that ok, though you could tell it was loaded. When I turned on some lights and a space heater, it kept tripping the circuit. That should have been well within its rated capacity. It is rated for 5500W surge, and 5250 continuous. The heat pump is 3500W and the space heater is 1500W, so it was tripping at 5000W. That could be dicey if I need it in the winter. I might need to look into a larger generator.
The only good part is that when it trips, it doesn't completely shut off everything, it only shuts off the one rail that was "overloaded". So my lights and everything were still on. The heat pump didn't shut off when that happened though, I hope it didn't hurt it losing one of its power rails.
After that I went to hook up the mains. First I had to find them though. I chopped down every pipe that was down there.
Still no service lines to be found. The really long tube looks like it was the water line. Once I realized that (it was a different diameter than the others) this is the tube I expected to find them in. The one on the right is the romex that I think goes to the outlet on the other side of the creek.
I had no idea what the others were for, but they were empty too.
Starting to panic a little bit, I started looking around at all the conduit that is in the ground that I know of. I know a chunk got taken out where the septic is going.
Another chunk was already removed.
I thought those were powering the old foundation though. There is also the wiring down at the well. This has service lines run to it for no apparent reason (there is no way they ran 2-2-4 for the pump). I wonder if the random romex was for the well pump and the service lines then got run through one of the empty conduits that are chilling.
Now that I look at it more closely, the well wiring more closely matches what is in the conduit at the power pole itself. It isn't just service lines going into the conduit, there is also a outdoor 10 or 12 gauge romex, and another random 12 gauge wire.
And the last two spots with conduit are the outlets on the other side of the creek.
And the random wires sticking up in the driveway.
I also spent an hour or so walking around to see if there was anything I might have missed, and if I missed a wire or conduit before, I missed it again.
I also spent a little time trying to figure out where I could run a trencher if I need to run new lines. Any way you look at it, I need to to cross the driveway, which means rock. I am thinking it would be better to cross in front and while it might end up being annoyingly close to the septic lines, better those than running it around the slab and crossing the water inlets.
Unfortunately it was around 6 when I decided that I had wasted enough time on it. I will need assistance to decipher the wiring. Since there is no breaker down there yet that can actually take a wire of that size, I would need someone to hold the wires and another person to check the voltage. Another possible suggestion Dad mentioned is using a smoke bomb. That might be interesting, but I might need something to blow the water out of the lines first.
The bad news didn't end there. I also noticed as I went to close up that I still apparently have mice. That likely means that they finally figured out how to crawl in through the plumbing, or I have a hole somewhere that is large enough for them to fit in. They don't need much, but I thought it was pretty tight.
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