There are several stories in the works. I am waiting on the septic field to be completed so I can tell that story. I am also waiting on the inspectors opinion of my waterproofing tests. The latest drama is my inspectors concern about the back-filling. Since this concern came in after the footings were formed, it could be quite costly to remedy… I’ll find out tomorrow where that will go (it ended up fine, video of the back-filling showed enough tamping). In the mean time, I am guessing I won’t get any more permits approved until we sort these things out.
So, lets talk about something completely different, my new Over the Tire Tracks (OTT) for my Skid Steer.
My skid-steer was pretty useless in sand. As soon as you start to turn, it starts to sink and and you are quickly stuck. I researched over the tire tracks (OTT) and quickly discovered that even if you buy tracks, they won’t work very well unless you also buy new tires. The back tires were already new, I just needed to replace the front tires… I figured that I should replace the tires and see if I still needed the tracks. $400 later, I discovered that my skid-steer was still pretty useless in the sand.
I don’t spend money lightly, and OTT are expensive, so I spent weeks looking for a decent “used” pair. Occasionally, the steel bar kind would show up on Craig’s list. Of course they were all rusty and most seemed to be for the wrong tire size or spacing… but the kicker was that they were still selling for more than half their new price. From my research, I knew that these bar tracks would give good traction on some types of ground, but I needed “flotation” on the sand. I needed wide rubber pad tracks. I didn’t see those second hand anywhere.
Also, OTT tracks also require at least 3 inches of space between the tires and the side of the Skid Steer… I measured and had only 2.25 inches. I called around and found that the 3 inches was definitely a minimum. The solution was to buy and install “wheel spacers”, another $300. This made me wait even longer to order…
Eventually, I gave in and ordered a set of Prowler Stealth OTT with the extra spacers. I almost backed out, so the sales guy offered me an even better deal, plus free shipping. They arrived a week later on a 1400 lb pallet that I was able to easily offload from the truck with my skid steer…
I took the wheels off and put on the wheel spacers. They were just over 2″ thick, which added 4″ of lateral stability to my SkidSteer… They went on pretty easily thanks to the old, but powerful socket driver my father left with me during his last visit. Basically, you bolt them on where the tire was and then use their new wheel studs to bolt your old tires back on.
After all 4 wheels were back on, it was time to get the tracks on… These suckers were heavy. I managed to lay out one side and drive the skid steer on to it, then I used a rope tied around the wheel to pull the track up onto the wheel as I drove forward. For the other end of the track, the only option was muscling it into place. I found it difficult to lift it and guide it properly over the tire treads, so I appreciated my wife helping out with that part.
Prowler provides some tools to help you wrangle the tracks together so you can slide in the carriage bolts. I am guessing that these tools probably work well with the other types of track that they sell (as shown in the instructions), but the Stealth rubber tracks have less space between them and it is tough to get the turnbuckle in place. Once it is in place, it tends to turn the rubber pads out of alignment rather than bring them together. Eventually, I managed to get the first track bolted on, but that was just the start. Once the track was in place, I was able to measure the slack and find that I needed to remove about 5 inches of total length. That is too little to remove a whole link, so you need to do it by unhooking and re-hooking individual links using the half inch shorter hole. This meant I was going to get lots of practice.
The instructions show using the turnbuckle tool positioned between the tires, and I did the first couple that way, but I soon found it was easiest to take advantage of the natural slack in-front of the tire. I could pretty easily move that link into position, the hard part was reaching inside to put the carriage bolt in place. As I got more and more links tightened, it got harder and harder to pull the track into position and I was back to using the turnbuckle for the last couple holes.
One problem with the turnbuckle is that it was pulling the tracks together in a way that rotated them so that I couldn’t get the bolts in the right place… I eventually solved this problem by adding stakes that kept everything flat. I eventually got the first track all tightened up. I had shifted 9 links.
I then shifted 9 links on the other track while it was laying on the ground. That was a lot easier. Getting the second track up on the skidsteer was also easier, thanks to some practice. But it still took me quite a while to get the last two bolts in place to secure the track…
How did it work out? Pretty well. I can now actually use the skid steer on my sandy site. I have since used it to save about $1000 worth of footings work. I also used it to unload a couple tons of rebar from the top of a truck. It moved a few hundred feet of 8″ pipe to the edge of a trench in one trip, etc… I am sure it will come in very handy for the rest of the construction phase… And then? Maybe I sell the skid steer with the tracks?
For the Video:
For the Story:
An inspection is needed before back-filling. Inspections in our township are limited to Monday, Wednesday or Friday, 10:00 AM to noon. And you are required (ideally) to give the inspector two days notice. Sherri and I had already got the waterproofing up and started the drain tile the weekend before, so on Monday, I scheduled the inspection for Wednesday morning and scheduled Roe Brothers Excavation for Wednesday afternoon. The plan was to complete the drain tile on Monday or Tuesday evening, but we had thunderstorms…
My sister (Bonnie) visited us from Canada again, arriving by motorcycle late Tuesday night. I am sure she was thrilled to hear that we would be getting up again at 5:00 AM. We had to get out to the property by first light in order to be sure to get the drain tile in before the inspector arrived.
Drain tile
They call it “drain tile” because it used to be made of clay tiles, curved like Spanish roofing tiles. Now days, it is much better to buy long plastic tubes. Special drain tile PVC is probably better to use because it has smooth walls and lays straight, but I used the corrugated HDPE pipe instead, primarily because of the price and because it is easy to lay around curved walls. I admit that the corrugations are not ideal if you want water to drain out of the tiles completely. I bought drain tile with a sock around it because it was only 5 cents more per ft (it is 50 cents more per foot with the sock if you buy it at Home Depot, so don’t buy it there).
Having to lay the drain tile is a little frustrating because, with all the sand on the site, drain tile is totally unnecessary. We have gone thru many storms in that excavation and have seen that water just falls thru the sand and the water table is not a problem. However, drain tile is required by code. A fellow builder in the same sandy area told me that he put in the drain tile to pass the back-fill inspection, but didn’t actually run it anywhere to drain. Even the building inspector told me that he doesn’t expect my drain tile will ever carry any water.
However, I am the kind of guy who likes to do things right anyway. I spent a lot of time making sure that my drain met the required slope all the way to daylight. This required a lot of digging to lower or raise the ground level.
The building inspector also insisted that we follow the building code requirement to cover our drain tile with 6 inches of pea stone and cover that with landscapers fabric. This would have been great on my current house which is built in clay… Research on the internet showed that it was best to lay the landscapers fabric down first, then lay the tube and gravel and cover it with the other half of the fabric like a very crunchy burrito. The truck delivering the pea stone couldn’t get very close because he was sinking in to our sand (irony?), so we had to carry 4 yards (actually only used 3 of them) down to the footing by bucket.
To make these drain tiles worth all the effort, I decided to use them as bonus earth tubes. This required a change in the layout. Instead of a loop around the house and a single tube draining to daylight, I made it a circuit with both ends draining to daylight… That took an extra hundred and fifty ft of tube that I will run down the same trench as the septic pipe. Actually, I took it one step further and connected the high end of the tubes into my house. Sherri thinks this is a terrible idea because the air traveling thru the tubes could be picking up mold from the corrugations. The fact that it passes thru the septic trench doesn’t help. I think it was fairly low cost and has minimal risk and I can seal it if she turns out to be right.
Back to the Story…
This lugging pea-stone was the fun part that Bonnie arrived just in time for. My wife and boys also carried their fair share of pea stone that morning. The work goes by quick in the timelapse video, but it took several hours in real life. Then we closed the landscapers fabric and waited for the inspector.
He arrived and took a careful walk around. I was expecting him to check the slope, but he seemed content with a visual inspection. I guess it was obvious that it dropped by a ft along the side of the footing. He did comment that my drain tile burrito was strange because most people just lay the landscapers fabric on top of the pea stone, not under it… We passed that part of the inspection.
Waterproofing?
The inspector was much more concerned about my waterproofing.
I didn’t want to use the stinky tar that is commonly used in my area. It is dirty and smelly and a pain to put up. Other “board based” waterproofing is expensive and much better suited to smooth flat walls. I ended up going with an “elastomeric penetrating sealer”. The install was covered in this post. This stuff sprayed on with a paint sprayer, but quickly soaked in and dried clear… Other than slightly darkening the color of the concrete, you can’t even see or feel it. At a microscope level, it has actually affected the chemical structure of the first quarter inch of concrete to lock out the water… And the elastomeric part will actually bridge cracks to keep them sealed (so they claim).
Anyway, I can’t blame the inspector for questioning a new type of waterproofing that he had never seen before (and still hadn’t really been able to see). He asked for literature on the waterproofing, specifically, if it had passed a certain test. I said I had seen the tech specs on line and they talked about this being for above and below grade waterproofing of foundations and basement walls. I could send him links that evening (in the mean time, Sherri actually got them on her smartphone while on site).
Meanwhile, I had a crew coming to back fill right after lunch.
The inspector decided to give me a “provisional” pass. I could proceed at my own risk. If the waterproofing turned out not to be acceptable, construction would need to stop until I dug it up and reapplied waterproofing so I could pass this inspection. Ouch. But I was pretty confident that basement waterproofing sold at Home Depot would pass. Surely, I couldn’t be the first person to try to use it? Dun dun dunnnn!!!
Back to the Story…
After lunch, the excavators arrived to back-fill. We had made it quite clear that we needed this fill to be well compacted because other footings will go on it. I also marked the 4ft level along the walls and told them to stop at that point so I could put in earth tubes and rigid insulation. They put the sand back in in lifts, each just over 1 ft, and then tamped like crazy with a mechanical tamper.
In this pic, I let my older son go in to help rake even though my wife was very nervous about him being down there while the excavator was running.
Earth tubes
Earth tubes have been central to my plan since the beginning. You can see these pages about earth tube design. So it felt great to finally be putting them in. It was also great to have my hard working (and digging gifted) sister to help me out. The primary earth tubes are 8″ double wall HDPE pipe that run over 250 ft down the hill to daylight. They cost about 6 times what the 4″ corrugated pipe costs, but they are stronger, have a smooth inside and 4 times the cross sectional area. The pipe I bought was “earth tight”, rather than “water tight”, just to keep the cost down.
We sloped the pipes at 1/4 inch per ft, which required digging into the freshly compacted sand. The difficulty of digging actually made me feel better about how well compacted the sand was. It took us past dark to get the work done.
This pic shows that we had to cut the pipe and join sections with 30 degree and 45 degree bends. Everything locked together without need for screws.
The next morning, we got Marty (from Roe Brothers Excavating) to compact over the earth tubes for us.
On the other side of the house, we put in shorter earth tubes (average 75 ft) between the house and the window well (as the low point). Here I experimented a bit. I did put in two more of the 8″ double wall HDPE pipes, but I also put in a 6 inch corrugated HDPE pipe and a 4 inch Corrugated HDPE pipe.
Last (and probably least), I put in a 1″ solid pipe (it was actually intended as irrigation pipe). I have had the opportunity to computer model a system for a researcher in India who is working with a system of 1″ earth tubes. His physical model is producing good results so far (he has asked me not to show his results until he publishes his paper). My biggest objection is that the 1″ pipe actually costs about the same as the 4″ pipe, but you would need 16 of them to get the same cross sectional area. There is also the issue of greater back-pressure thru smaller pipes. The benefit is supposed to be much greater surface area, and therefore better heat exchange, so you can use shorter pipes… I am looking forward to the conclusion of the research, but wanted to test my own.
I used hydrolic cement to seal the pipes into the holes I had made in the basement wall. I also filled the area around the connection with pea stone so that water couldn’t sit there.
Back to the Story…
Once the pipes were back in, back-filling and compacting proceeded as before.
At certain times, Bonnie and I laid down Foamular 250 rigid insulation to help trap heat in the volume of earth around the basement. I will talk more about that another time…
The back-filling isn’t completely done, first we need to finish the trench down to the septic tank, and then we can back-fill on that north west side of the house.
This week included an overnight work party at the property with some friends, Aaron and Ryan. We headed out after work on Wednesday and got in a few hours working on the window well until it got a bit dark. Then we had a nice camp fire (using my rocket stove) and talked until past two in the morning.
The next day, we got up before 7 and worked on Rebar until they had to go mid-morning. At 9:00 AM, my N-12 pipe arrived and I was glad to have my friends there to help me unload it.
After they left, I tied rebar for a while, then spent a few hours on off camera tasks like getting new tires and parts for my skid steer. Eventually, I got back and spent the rest of the day on Electrical.
Here is the video.
Extra Info;
XPS forms?
I wanted to use a different approach for forming the window well… Partially because I wanted to experiment with different methods and partially because the window well is more exposed to the environment and I didn’t think the metal lath and studs would be a good idea. I originally thought I would just do it with plywood sheathing and 2x4s.
On the way out to the property, we stopped to pick up a trailer full of wood at Home Depot. Sheathing Plywood is actually pretty expensive. More expensive than tongue and groove 1” rigid XPS insulation… So we switched plans on the fly and bought the XPS instead. I also considered going with OSB, Oriented Strand Board), and bought a couple sheets, but didn’t use them. The XPS was easy to work with and I am pretty happy with the decision. The test will be when we shoot the shotcrete at it. XPS is tougher than the EPS backing that I saw used with shotcrete last year, plus it is firmly attached to treated 2x4s, so I think it will be fine.
At the end of the day, I think the XPS and 2×4 approach was easier to assemble. However, it is also more expensive, especially if you are building forms more than 8ft tall.
Curving rebar?
For curving the rebar, we tried a few things, including the rebar hickey. The main difficulty is getting the right curvature and all in one single plane. Bending rebar is easy, curving rebar to a precise shape takes technique. The winning solution is shown in the video.
We stand on the rebar and pull one side up a certain amount (experience helps). Basically, it is not really a continuous curve, but more piecewise linear. When the raised end becomes two difficult for one person to manage, one person holds it vertical (in plane) so the other person can do a similar bend from the other end. Due to the way that steel stays in the elastic range for a while and then yields for a permanent bend, we need to over bend it to start. So the second step is to push it down flat, again keeping it in plane. (an improvement I worked out on a later day was to walk it flat instead of using our hands to wrestle it down). When we let it go, it springs back to a curve with a larger radius.
We had marked the radius we wanted in the sand and we set the curved rebar in the sand “template” to check it. Some of them were right on. If they needed any adjustment, one of us would stand at the point where things started to go off the line and the other one would pull the rebar horizontally and adjust it into shape… The adjustment is actually so fast and easy that the timelapse camera, with a 10 second period, didn’t catch us doing it.
Electrical
The electrical takes longer than I thought I would… I have a plan that I am referring to, but actually wresling the blue Smurf tube (ENT conduit) into position thru all the right holes is a bit tricky.
Also, my plan didn’t take into account how many tubes would leave each box and their directions.
NEC code prohibits bending the ENT by more than 180 degrees along its length. Each box is attached to a stud. In many cases, the stud blocks one side of the box and leaves only 3 knock outs for the conduit to attach to. These are in a chain, so a light switch needs one pipe to carry electricity in and other to continue the circuit to the next switch. A third tube goes vertical toward the ceiling where we will eventually put the light fixture. Ideally, the third tube would come from the knock out at the top of the box. The problem happens when the power is coming from above (such as over a door). If I run it down and around to the bottom of the box, it would exceed the 180 degrees of bending that code permits. Instead, I must run it into the side of the box and run the “out” tube from the bottom of the box even though it actually needs to go sideways… What if I also want to branch my circuit in a second direction? Anyway, it takes some head scratching. I will shot for an electrical inspection next Wednesday.
Sourcing
When you walk into Home Depot, there are lots of big signs about ordering online. This is because they don’t have everything in the store. For instance, none of the rebar tools on the Home Depot website are actually available on the shelf. However, it also helps for buying cases or quantities not available in the store. If you buy individual outlet boxes, they cost about 2 dollars each. If you buy them in bulk, you can get a case of 50 for $38, that is about half the price. But you can only buy the case on line. Also, for some reason, the stores only stock 100 ft lengths of ¾” ENT tube. The ½” tube costs quite a bit less, but only comes in 25ft lengths, and if you buy 4 of those, it costs more than the ¾” ENT tube in the 100ft roll. The only way to get ½” tube at a good price is to buy a 200 ft roll on-line (which costs just a little more than the 100ft roll of ¾” tube). Get it? Good.
Problem is that it doesn’t always work out right. I ordered a case of 50 outlets. It was 1 case, so the quantity was listed as “1” and the amount charged was ~$38.00. I chose to pick it up in the store. When I went to the service desk to pick it up, they had set aside one single box for me… I showed the girl my smartphone with the email showing I had been billed for a case, but there wasn’t much she could do except put it back as if I had not come in to pick it up. They didn’t have any in stock at that store. I ended up driving to two other stores in different cities trying to find enough boxes to finish my job.
I got an email today saying that if I don’t pick it up soon, the order will be canceled, so I guess I don’t need to do anything.
I don’t spend money lightly, and OTT are expensive, so I spent weeks looking for a decent “used” pair. Occasionally, the steel bar kind would show up on Craig’s list. Of course they were all rusty and most seemed to be for the wrong tire size or spacing… but the kicker was that they were still selling for more than half their new price. From my research, I knew that these bar tracks would give good traction on some types of ground, but I needed “flotation” on the sand. I needed wide rubber pad tracks. I didn’t see those second hand anywhere.
