What did you do with your Power Trac today?

   / What did you do with your Power Trac today? #272  
Has it ever happened before?
Kind of. I once debeaded a tire, but the tire stayed on the rim as I was doing a low speed turn on a slope, with 800lbs or so out front. I hadn't checked the tire pressures in ages, and they had dropped to 7-10psi, which is just too low for my slopes. As soon as I put air in the valve stem, the tire reseated itself. Easy peazey.

All the best,

Peter
 
   / What did you do with your Power Trac today? #273  
I spun one off abusing my loader. Damaged it badly and I had to replace the tire.
 
   / What did you do with your Power Trac today? #274  
California just had a couple of big for us storms. December was a wet, wet month for us; we had 7.46" of precipitation. To put that in perspective, "normal" here is close to one inch for December, and 12-15" for the year, and the last four years we have averaged closer to 10" of precipitation for the whole year.

In the last two days we received two inches, for which we are quite thankful.
(Rain=ground water = aquifer = drinking water)
Water is pouring out of pretty much everything. Yesterday, I had to remove the rodent screens on our underground drains for retaining walls and the horse arena as the three inch drain lines were backed up trying to go through the screens. At the moment, water is bubbling up out of ground squirrel burrows (yay!), which I love to see. I think it is pretty wild as the pasture is full of these springs so, it seems like there are moving puddles on the slopes. With any luck, the saturated soil will slow down the ground squirrel population that has been out of control the last few years. Saturated soil and slopes tends to reduce the stability of the earth as the soil gets buoyed up by all the water in it, leading to landslides and debris flows. The gutter on the driveway is running close to 15-20gpm, just from water weeping out of the embankment of the upper pasture. That water eventually joins more water to flow along and on our county road.

Which leads me to how I spent this morning; cleaning up debris flows that had flowed off the bottom of our property onto our local road. Water was flowing all over the road, and draining over the edge of the road in to a ravine, rather than going through the controlled flow of a culvert. I took off probably four cubic yards of earth, (aka saturated clay/mud), and another five or so of leaves that the storm had brought down and were clogging the "gutter" on the side of the road. I find our wet clay is just amazingly sticky. The bucket sticks going in, the tractor bogs down scraping it up, and the clay sticks to the bucket badly enough to need a shovel to get it back off again, even after dumping the bucket. (Tips on how not have clay stick are welcome!)

So now the country road drains along the gutter again, and isn't at risk of eroding, which means we keep our access to the outside world.

It was a gorgeous day; clear, sunny, and nippy (40F).

Have a great one!

Peter

And yes, the PT needs a bath now as it is thoroughly covered in mud splatters.
 
   / What did you do with your Power Trac today? #275  
Sounds like a day where you accomplished something at least. I've been in the Smokey's during floods. Amazing amounts of water.

Here, there is rarely a flood. The river through town comes up once in a while, but we are a couple miles from it. Pretty darn flat around here. The most rain I've ever seen at once is 5" in a day, and it caused very minor erosion in the dirt shoulder in front of our house, but that's about it.

My father had dug swales in his yard to protect the house from 100 year floods. I only saw them work once, but work they did.

Our yard is slightly sloped in places for the same reason. The only time I've seen the swales with water in them was when the mole popped our swimming pool liner. 🙃
 
   / What did you do with your Power Trac today? #276  
Sounds like a day where you accomplished something at least. I've been in the Smokey's during floods. Amazing amounts of water.

Here, there is rarely a flood. The river through town comes up once in a while, but we are a couple miles from it. Pretty darn flat around here. The most rain I've ever seen at once is 5" in a day, and it caused very minor erosion in the dirt shoulder in front of our house, but that's about it.

My father had dug swales in his yard to protect the house from 100 year floods. I only saw them work once, but work they did.

Our yard is slightly sloped in places for the same reason. The only time I've seen the swales with water in them was when the mole popped our swimming pool liner. 🙃
Sounds like your dad thought ahead.(y)(y)

👀 5" is a third of our "normal" rainfall, half of what we have been getting in each of the last four years. Our insurer said that they would happily insure against rising water, but not water flowing down hill. Go figure.

We are at the top of a big hill (1200' down in mile one way, and 2000' down in a couple of miles the other), and I worry about drainage a lot because with the slopes, the speed of moving water is so erosive. I have worked on lots of projects here, and I find myself constantly going "how far should I mitigate this risk?" "How much will it cost?" "How much will it cost if I underbuild, and it fails?" Fire, earthquake, flood... "Do I really believe that a 100 year flood is once in a hundred years these days?" (Me, no, based on the last few decades...) I guess generally I try for solutions that I think will be good twenty-five to a hundred years, I.e. fix it once and done for me, and perhaps the next owner as well. With a changing climate, I find it hard to have confidence in my predictions.

The joys of small property ownership, and I do enjoy the constantly changing nature of the problems.

Now on to designing a loading dock for the barn, so the Power-Trac bucket and forks don't chew up the side of the barn. (Actually they don't when I am driving, but we recently had a load of hay in and the loading team were monkeying around at the end and managed muck up the doorsill somehow. Their squeeze weighs something like 50,000lbs, so when it hits/presses against a wood structure directly, the barn gives. Our barn door gave. It is three feet above grade, so I am going to try to put in a semi style loading dock. I just need to figure out how to beef up the barn to take the hit...
 
   / What did you do with your Power Trac today? #277  
Sounds like your dad thought ahead.(y)(y)

👀 5" is a third of our "normal" rainfall, half of what we have been getting in each of the last four years. Our insurer said that they would happily insure against rising water, but not water flowing down hill. Go figure.

We are at the top of a big hill (1200' down in mile one way, and 2000' down in a couple of miles the other), and I worry about drainage a lot because with the slopes, the speed of moving water is so erosive. I have worked on lots of projects here, and I find myself constantly going "how far should I mitigate this risk?" "How much will it cost?" "How much will it cost if I underbuild, and it fails?" Fire, earthquake, flood... "Do I really believe that a 100 year flood is once in a hundred years these days?" (Me, no, based on the last few decades...) I guess generally I try for solutions that I think will be good twenty-five to a hundred years, I.e. fix it once and done for me, and perhaps the next owner as well. With a changing climate, I find it hard to have confidence in my predictions.

The joys of small property ownership, and I do enjoy the constantly changing nature of the problems.

Now on to designing a loading dock for the barn, so the Power-Trac bucket and forks don't chew up the side of the barn. (Actually they don't when I am driving, but we recently had a load of hay in and the loading team were monkeying around at the end and managed muck up the doorsill somehow. Their squeeze weighs something like 50,000lbs, so when it hits/presses against a wood structure directly, the barn gives. Our barn door gave. It is three feet above grade, so I am going to try to put in a semi style loading dock. I just need to figure out how to beef up the barn to take the hit...
At my last job, I kept pressing for a backup generator. They kept installing multiple small UPS boxes. At best, we could keep all the servers running long enough for someone to come in and shut them down nicely. I asked my mentor, the publisher, why and he said you can redundancy yourself into the poorhouse. They found a total loss of 24 hours of data input was tolerable. They backed up every 24 hours. So that was good enough. Server damage was minimal, although there were several times when we'd lose multiple drives in one instance. Again, they thought the risk was tolerable.

So, I keep that in mind. How badly do I want to protect my property, without spending more than just replacing everything is worth? How much damage am I willing to tolerate?
 
   / What did you do with your Power Trac today? #278  
At my last job, I kept pressing for a backup generator. They kept installing multiple small UPS boxes. At best, we could keep all the servers running long enough for someone to come in and shut them down nicely. I asked my mentor, the publisher, why and he said you can redundancy yourself into the poorhouse. They found a total loss of 24 hours of data input was tolerable. They backed up every 24 hours. So that was good enough. Server damage was minimal, although there were several times when we'd lose multiple drives in one instance. Again, they thought the risk was tolerable.

So, I keep that in mind. How badly do I want to protect my property, without spending more than just replacing everything is worth? How much damage am I willing to tolerate?
I see where your publisher was coming from. Makes sense to me.

Hmmm, yeah, backups. I can't count the number of folks that I know or know of that a) never checked to see if they could restore from their backups initially, or b) later, or c) stored them next to the computer, or d) in the cloud with security under someone else's control...

One of my first jobs just before Y2K was a building design for a company that had projects that ran a month to completion. So a loss of power would blow two months of work.

The company was located in a city that, at the time, imported 60% of its power on a single power line. The line was subject to fires, earthquakes, and hurricanes. I did the math and insisted that they put in a prime power backup generator large enough to cover the key parts of the business. Much teeth gnashing, but they did it. A year later, the Enron induced rolling power outages occurred in California. They were the only business in the area that carried on as normal. They were very happy campers.

Since then, they have had fires and earthquakes, but no hurricanes yet, and the business is still running.

Did I foresee Enron? No way. But it was not a hard call to realize that there were a bunch of risks to their power supply, and that being down for two months or more would be company ending in all likelihood.

All the best,

Peter
 
   / What did you do with your Power Trac today? #279  
At the newspaper, I wanted the generator to protect the data, not to keep operations running. That would have been darn near impossible due to the press drew well over a megawatt. Our backup plan for the press going down was to take our product pieces to another newspaper, have them print it, then truck it back.
 
   / What did you do with your Power Trac today? #280  
I've been through more the a few business resumption projects. All of them would start out with all the data and all people were equally important to keep rolling in the event of an event, and an event would include a comet slamming into the earth. That level of protection was the easiest to work up a budget for, you just mention 1-10 million dollars a day and most businesses can't support that level of cash flow as an expense. Then they'd get serious and figure out their business was actually doing.
 
 
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