Saturday 15th June 2019:


Today I did a 2 for 1; I got some practice with 'Mr Mitarai' digging trenches and at the same time relieved (or hope too) some of the poor drainage around our current site for the van at Jamie's (my son's) place.

There was some PVC piping lying around the back of he's shed, I bought some excess stock of a retired plumber (via FB marketplace) and a trip to Bunnings secured the rest required.

At present the two water tanks catching water from the shed roof have their overflows just dumping straight to the ground at the tank bases.  This is not ideal and on top of the heavy rain of late, the rear paddock is very spongy; adding the roof runoff doesn't help.  Then add our grey water runoff from the van, and the situation is far from ideal.

So the plan is, to pipe all that water down the paddock to an existing swale about 20 meters away, which then will disperse the water further down hill into the paddock

I cut pipe and added appropriate joints to get the three water sources connected to a single pipe out to the swale.

Using the backhoe is a dream; doing this by hand would be a day long task, end up with an early night to bed and hands full of blisters.  The BX dug the trench in about an hour!  The only complaint is having to rotate the seat between the driving forward position and then rotating it to use the backhoe.  The BX has only one seat obviously.

The design of the rotating seat is a disaster with more moving parts than a mechanical watch. And the process to unhook, lift, rotate and lock is complicated.  I still haven't worked out a routine which doesn't entail a couple of failed attempts.  I can see this mechanise being a fail point in near future.

Anyway have a look at the photos below and you can see how I went.  I laid out the pipe first, spray marked the line, which I then trenched.  Its pretty straight I think :)


You can see the two tanks behind the shed.  Those two overflow pipes just stopped at the ground.  I jointed them together, then to a third pipe draining the grey water from the van (which is just beside the shed on the left).  How's my trench line?  BTW there is a kink in the trench where the van grey water joins; you can see it more clearly below.


This pic looks towards the swale where the BX is parked.

Tomorrow I'll add the pipe to the trench and set the pipe gradient.  We are due a thunderstorm here tomorrow so I'll see how it all works before I set the joints and backfill the trench.  All good fun.  Better than doing PowerPoint presentations, but not as financially rewarding :(












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