Recent content by Country Geek

They did directional drilling on my install. It was less destructive to the ground than trenching but don't fool yourself, it still disturbs a lot of ground. In my case they dug parallel trenches three feet deep and 150 feet apart and did the directional drilling from one of the trenches to...

I don't know but I'll try to give a quick summary. Sorted from best to worst: Fiber internet: Google fiber, etc. Almost never available in rural areas. Requires fiber optics to be installed. Speeds up to 1 gigabit per second. Usually unlimited data (no data caps) Cable internet: Seldom...

The one in the middle was used in the filming of For Your Eyes Only, and has an elevator to bring supplies up. Or as was demonstrated in the movie, you can just climb the cliff face.

Last fall I had my HVAC system replaced with a dual-fuel geothermal heat pump, and I had a thread here for the install. http://www.tractorbynet.com/forums/rural-living/322143-geothermal-heat-pump-install-crawlspace.html Now that the first heating season is over, I can look at the data on how...

Look at this one. Assume North is up. Do you think that traffic that's coming southbound and turning right to go west on the other road, should yield to traffic that's turned left onto the same road from the northbound direction of the main road?

This past Friday I noticed water dripping into the top of one of my windows, which is under a place where two roof lines come together. Sure enough, I had a massive ice dam that had formed so I had to go onto my roof with a hoe and breakapart the ice dam. Luckily it was already warming up so...

I've said many times on here that I don't think Davis is worth the price difference over AcuRite, but I will say that one nice feature of Davis is that the rain cup can be easily removed and cleaned. I've found on mine that's necessary 2-3 times a year, and maybe more often in the fall when the...

That's awesome. I wish my power company did that. We just get a low-res bar graph printed on the bill, and it only goes back one year.

Here are a couple of pictures of the compressor. It's on rubber feet which are on a concrete block. It's close to the bottom of the joists but not touching. How much room doe a jacket take? As you can see there isn't a whole lot of room here.

I didn't really do a good job of keeping up with this but I did want to close it out. They finished the install and turned on the geothermal system on Friday, November 14th. That night the temperature plunged and we've had several mornings of temps below 20 degrees since then. The system has...

Finally have some down time with the computer to put up some pictures. As I said earlier, the ground loop contractor started with a plan to dig 7 trenches but abandoned that after the first trench because of cave-ins and running into junk that my clearing contractor buried 16 years ago so they...

The first trench is done. In previous pictures there were spill piles on both sides of the trench. I talked to the installer and he explained to me that I had two layers of soil, a more sandy type of clay soil on top and more chunky clay underneath. He had made the sandy soil pile on one...

Digging has started. 7 trenches, 150 feet long, three feet wide by six feet deep. When you say that the trenches are three feet wide, it seems like that's not that much... they shouldn't take up too much space, right? Well they don't. It's the spoil piles that take up all the space! In my...

I had started and participated in a thread or two here recently about geothermal heat pumps, trying to decide if one is right for me. I've decided to pull the trigger and I'll follow the install on this thread. Background: I'm replacing a dual-fuel air-source heat pump. The backup furnace...