Early this morning (about 07:30) there was a knock on the door. Two of Niedermaier GmbH's employees (plumbers) were there, ready to start working on drilling through the foundation of Harting 10, so that we could pull the heating and network pipes through the wall. I was expecting a delivery of the solar panels and the water tank for Harting 8 at 08:00 but wasn't really expecting the drilling to go ahead. They had only just brought their drills downstairs when the delivery lorry pulled up. The next half hour was spent taking solar panels, the water tank and various fittings off the truck and into the shed. We are now ready to install the solar panels - we just need a roof first. When Johannes Stuckenberger starts on (hopefully) May 6th, there should be scaffolding and a crane, so it should be easy to hoist the big water tank you see in the background in the picture up and into the attic of Harting 8. The solar panels will have to wait until the roof is finished. There should be enough work to do to keep the plumbers busy for a while, once the crane arrives.
The drilling went much faster than I expected. They bored a 200mm hole for the heating pipe and a 80mm hole for the pipe to carry the network cable. The next job was to put the pipes through the wall. I had to do a substantial amount of digging - not only was the channel not deep enought where it intersected the sewerage pipe, I also had to dig away about another 12cm from the right hand wall of the channel where it met the wall. On the inside, the oil tanks were in the way and the plumbers needed room to actually join the incoming pipes with the internal system. As well as more digging, I had to take the drillhammer and knock out more of the silo walls. There was quite a lot of scrap metal in the hole as well - that had to be cut with a small angle grinder. Meanwhile, the plumbers had cut the sewerage pipe so we could get the heating pipe down under it. I had thought that we would have to go over the sewerage pipe - which would take us well within a metre of the surface, which is bad news for frost - but they assured me that they could quickly fix a collar to the sewerage pipe and join it back up again. The job of actually getting the pipe into the wall was easier than I thought - the pipe is extremely stiff, but with three people and a heap of heavy rocks to keep the pipe from springing back up out of the channel, we got it through. The plumbers then used a special collar on the inside (costs over €200) to fully seal the join.
This all means that we are finished with the groundworks - ahead of schedule. I can now look forward to a couple of hours of slavery shoving the heaps of clay back into the channel. Below are more pictures so you get an idea of what went on.
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| This is what it looks like from the inside |
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| The first hole - see how little room there is on the right for the second pipe? |
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| The teeth of the drill coming through the wall |
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| Cutting a new length of pipe for the sewerage |
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| Both pipes fitted |
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| You can see the heating pipes are now below the sewerage |
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| Some of the fittings that we will need for fitting the solar panels |
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| The solar panels (without glass) and the water tank |
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| 200mm and 80mm core bores |
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