Power

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Haven Nearly With Power

My electrician asked me to be on site at 8:30 this morning, so I moseyed over around 8:10 thinking that I’d have at least an hour to clean up the yard. Ha. He rolled in at about 8:15! He discussed what he was going to do and where he was going to set up everything and I left him to it. I checked in on him at 10:30 and 1:00 and he was making good progress. When I went back around 3:15, he was gone and the work not quite where I expected it to be, but the important part was done. I imagine I’ll get an email from him tonight.

Here’s the first thing he did, installing posts and plywood to create a structure on which to screw the breaker box and outlets. This was the cheapest way to do it for now and I can later move the breaker box into a building if I so choose. The panel looks very neat and he used pressure-treated posts for the legs. I’ll be using posts like these for my clothesline.

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Here’s a closeup of the trench. The metal thing sticking out is the ground. It has to be about 2′ down.

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Because of the gravel pile, he was unable to get onto my property from Main Street and was very glad when I told him that there is a rear access through an easement. His trailer is unhooked because he had to go back to town for some conduit that his supplier forgot to ship him last week. I’m glad said conduit did arrive!

BTW, I plan to bring Miranda back to Haven through this rear access because the driveway entrance is so narrow and it takes a lot of work to get Miranda aligned just so to back her into it. Plus, why back in 100′ when I can drive in? 🙂

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Here is the ‘household’ socket into which SaskPower will plug their meter. It put it on a board that is attached directly to my power pole. You can see a conduit cover running down and into the ground.

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Here’s the board with the electrical panel. See that thing down to the right of it?

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A 30 amp outlet. YAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY.

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Close up of my pretty exterior-grade electrical box in oh-so-sexy contractor grey.

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I wanted a box I could lock. It is very difficult to open! You have to push the tab to the left and get it to fit through the door slot.

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I only have the main 100 amp breaker and the 30 amp breaker. We had discussed three 20 amp outlets as well, so that’s why I’m a little confused tonight. Not a big deal for now as I can always plug things into the RV exterior socket for now, but I really want a 20 amp outlet for my friend L to plug into when he gets here. I’ll see what the electrician says.

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Close up of the breakers. Top say 100, bottom says 30.

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Next step is that he will call SaskPower and tell them that I am ‘site ready’ and they will come and run cables down the pole to my household socket and plug in a meter. SaskPower says it will take at least 10 business days, but my electrician says it shouldn’t be more than two or three. We shall see…

I can’t believe that this is finally happening! Boondocking for most of 2013 was empowering, pun intended, but I’ll be glad this summer to not have to worry about powering the new internet booster, charging the laptops, using my external monitor, etc.

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Timber!

Last summer, I discovered that my property is a little bigger than I thought it was and that a row of mostly dead trees and sucker growth were not my property line. So getting rid of that mess was foremost on my mind as it would open up the lot considerably. My dear friend and self-appointed adopted dad Charles promised that the first nice day of spring that he had a new chainsaw chain, he would get those trees down for me. This afternoon, he made good on his promise!

Things are coming together! The electrician is coming first thing in the morning (!!!), another neighbour is going to tackle my gravel pile with his tractor, and the guy who is going to move my graineries might do so over the weekend (OMG).

When am I moving back to Haven? SaskPower will come within 10 days of the electrician to hook me up to the grid, so I’m not moving back before that happens, and the gravel has to be finished, too. I may get back there yet!

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Another Haven Power Update

Back in February, I finally got an electrician to come out here to give me an estimate on getting power to my property. We spoke about a mid-May installation, then the weather got unseasonably good, so I asked for late April, but early April worked better for him, and I got all excited about moving back to Haven early.

Well, it’s late April and there’s still no date on power going in. 🙁 This is not the electrician’s fault. He has been fabulous about staying on top of this and I have no reason to believe he’s trying to get out of the job. The problem is the weather keeps regressing.

He emailed this morning to ask me to call SaskPower to open an account with them for a new service. He thought he could do all of that for me, but SaskPower requires that a new connection request be made by the person who will be paying the bill. He gave me the phone number and the instructions to get through the menu maze, so I got a live person in the correct department in under 15 seconds.

I had to give my land description since we don’t have addresses here and got yet another hurdle. For some reason, they have my neighbour as having service on my lot! His lot and mine used to be one and were subdivided, so that could explain this problem, although there’s also the possibility that the RM (‘town office’) gave him the wrong info seeing as my neighbour is a tenant, not landowner. I gave them another land description provided on my certificate of title and that was helpful to confirm that I am indeed the owner of my lot and that the issue with the neighbour is a clerical, not legal one.

So the SaskPower lady put me on hold for a minute to speak to a supervisor. She came back and said that they have people whose sole job it is to sort out issues like these (!) and that we could go ahead with my application. I gave her my legal name and mailing address, confirmed the service going in (100 amps), and that there is likely not going to be any cost for me to have the meter put in because I have a pole and lines right at the property.

The next step is to schedule the installation of the meter. My electrical guy can do that. I provided SaskPower with his name and telephone number and they gave me a notification number to give to him to make his call easier. There’s a 10-business day delay between the call and the installation of the meter.

I was then asked if I had called ‘SaskEnergy’ and I thought, oh no, another hurdle! It turns out that they are the ones who provide natural gas service, which I am not dealing with this year. So there’s nothing to do on that end, nor am I having a telephone land line put in by SaskTel.

I am beyond ready to get back to Haven, but with the weather yo-yoing as it has, it would be stupid to go back without power on the lot. Never mind the giant pile of gravel I’m still working on…

Yay for my electrician, though! I am really pleased to have found him and I suspect I will have more work for him in the future. And yay for SaskPower as they have been super easy to deal with, a far cry from my experience with Hydro-Québec.

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Gambles

The late winter and early spring of 2004 has been on my mind lately. It was the time that I was turning 25, a bigger milestone for me than 20 had been. 35 is coming up fast and it feels more significant to me than 30 did.

2004 was the late winter/early spring that I gravely injured my right hand, had a bad car accident (again, not even remotely my fault), learned that I was going to be an aunt for the first time, and took what was probably the biggest gamble of my life up to that point.

I was working at what I still think was my dream job as the “office administrator/whatever they needed me to do because I was trained for absolutely everything including the outdoor jobs” for a private company managing the recreational services of a national park.

No two days were ever the same. I could be balancing the books one day and the next be on snowshoes marking a new trail through the wilderness.

The problem was that I was overworked, unappreciated, and really underpaid. Any one of those alone I could have handled, but combined I knew that it was time to get out of there get a ‘grown up’ job, ie. one that I didn’t like much but which would pay well.

So I had started to apply for jobs with the federal government. It was sometime in late February or early March of 2004 that I was asked to interview for a position I had applied for nearly a year before.

The initial testing went well and then came an interview that took most of a day and involved role playing. I was a timid creature back then with zero self esteem and yet the minute I picked up the first fake call I knew I had the job.

It took weeks for the confirmation to come through, to set a start date, and to have an idea of when the first paycheque would come, but before any of that gelled, I took a gamble.

I was driving a beat up old car (that was even worse for wear after the accident) and I decided to buy myself a brand new car for my 25th birthday, my first Hyundai Accent (which I liked more than my second even if it was an odd looking thing).

To this day, I have no idea how I got the financing on it because there was absolutely no way I could afford the payments! But the first payment on it would be mid-May, around the time that I would get a first paycheque from the government job… if I got the job, of course.

Everything fell into place, the way it does when it’s meant to be, and I never had any trouble making payments on that sweet little car.

It’s hard to reconcile how much I’ve done and seen with the smallness of time that has passed since that spring, with the only tangible evidence of it being the hard little knot of scar tissue on the pad of my right ring finger that is finally starting to soften a little.

But in that span of time I moved to a second government job, bought a house, lost my dad, quit the government, took off on the adventure of a lifetime, and saw more of the continent than that bitter girl of 25 ever dared dreamed she’d see.

I wish I could go back and tell that angry girl I used to be just how brave she was as she accepted the keys to her new car. Little did she know they were the keys that would open up her world and bring her to the life she’d always wanted but was convinced she did not deserve.

I’ve taken a lot of gambles since then, and each one gets easier and is less breathtaking. The first plunge is always the hardest and the real gamble I took in 2004 wasn’t buying the car. It was daring to see a future that was more open than the confines of the present. That’s a lesson that has obviously stayed with me.

But I’m not contemplating any gambles on this cold second day of spring of 2014. My life is plugging along just the way I want it to and I feel a confidence in my future that used to elude me.

Power is going into Haven in the next week or two, if the weather will just cooperate (earlier than expected, but it’s what works best for the electrician), so provided I can get the gravel smoothed out quickly, I could be back on my property within three weeks (!).

I’m casually shopping for a new-to-me RV (tiny bumper pull trailer), exploring both RV and non-RV travel options for next winter, planning summer trips, and working insane hours at a business that went from struggling to thriving in the span of a winter.

I definitely don’t need to be taking any gambles right now.

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Haven Power Update

Getting power put in on my property, Haven, has been surprisingly difficult because none of the local electricians will return my phone calls or emails. The only person who replied to me was a guy in Moose Jaw whose estimate came in at $2,700…

A few days ago, Caroline showed me an ad in the local paper for a new electrician in Assiniboia, so I promptly contacted him.

To my surprise, he got right back to me and scheduled a time to come meet me at Haven!

The meeting happened this afternoon. We walked the property together, talked about my immediate and future needs, his availability, and the price.

He needs to crunch numbers and check the cost of the socket into which SaskPower will plug their meter, but he’s thinking the job should come in somewhere between $1,200 and $1,500. That’ll be for the exterior grade box, the socket, the outlets, his time, permits, etc., etc.

Best of all, he can fit me in as soon as the weather is clement. I told him that I want to aim for May 15thish!

I spent about 8 months of 2013 off the grid and I will concede that I am DONE with boondocking for the time being. 😀 The thought of leaving Laura’s yard and being able to move to a place with 30A service sounds like pure luxury!

Having decided that I am going away next winter (even if I haven’t figured out how or where exactly yet), power is going to be the biggest expense at Haven this summer. Another load of gravel and moving the buildings will be about a $500 expense total. That’s really all I feel like spending this summer and I want any extra earnings to go to travel and squirreling away for the winter.

It’s such a relief to have this item off my to-do list. Now, I need to start planning an “RV Park Chez Rae Has Power!” party for the beginning of June. 😀