Today is Day One in construction of our solar power generation field. The first of three crews completed its work today – the “grounds” crew. Below is a photo essay of the job, with explanations. The really cool thing is that if you can scroll fast enough, you can view the entire day in time-lapse photography.
Shallow diggers.
The base of the solar posts is only a couple feet deep. Still, it is wide enough and heavy enough to keep the solar panels steady in hurricane force winds.
"Solar Crew" at work.
You can see here roughly the dimensions of the base, as the solar crew sets up the mold for the cement.
Trench between the posts.
Here you see the trench between the two posts, about two feet deep, as well.
The skeleton.
Reinforced concrete needs a skeleton of steel. The solar crew are hard at work building a skeleton befitting a large base. You can see also in this picture a couple other things. First, the height of the base, which comes up almost to the man’s waist – about 2.5 feet high. Second, the orange-capped pipes sticking up just above where the top of the concrete base will end.
Antenna for the base.
Atop these two pipes will sit the controls and monitoring devices. One pipe leads to the foot of the tower (and up through the tower to where the solar panels will sit), the other leads to the base beneath the second tower, through a trench…
Crime seem tape? No buried bodies here.
After laying some earth over the pipe, they placed police crime scene tape over it to warn anybody digging in the middle of our field that they can just store their spare dead bodies somewhere else.
The whole stage on which the installation is being enacted.
Here you can see the trench connecting the two towers. To the left, you can also see a yellow machine (sucking up chocolate milk through a straw?)
Mmm. Chocolate milk!
It might look like chocolate milk, but it is just plain mud. And that is not a straw, but a drill. The drill eventually made the entire 160-foot trip underground without moving from this spot. Why is it drilling into mud the consistency of chocolate milk? So glad you asked…
Filling for drilling.
Over at the house, they filled this tank up three times with water. The water helped the drill work, both by softening up the soil ahead (chocolate milk!) and by cooling the machinery so that it would not overheat.
Cut-away of the long-distance drill.
Every now and then, the drill hit interference, such as a clump of rocks, and the soil ahead of it needed to be removed. Here we see a cut-away, and you can see the drill-bit having already crossed through on its way to the house…where it will pull through a pipe to connect our solar installation to the provincial power grid through the meter on the outside of our house.
Next up, the second crew – the solar panel installers.
