Electrics and water

Normally they don’t mix, but they do when you’re trying to finish building a house. Today the electrician was busy working inside to pull together what appeared to me to be a huge amount of complicated wiring, see later below, and the ‘fosse septique’ duo were busy outside finishing the installation of the septic tank waste water treatment system and digging trenches for underground cables and pipes.

The programme for the septic tank boys was to finish connecting the pipework running from inside the house, make the trenches lower down the land to accept the now clean water run-off, make connections for the downpipes from the gutters, make trenches for the cables that will be left ready for my proposed garage (in front) and swimming pool pump (at the rear), extend the trenches in the front of the house for the mains electrical and water connections and then fill everything in and roughly level all the land that had been affected by all of this work.

For the most part the pictures speak for themselves. To start off with, here’s how things looked after they’d dug, connected and prepared to refill the run-off trenches. At this stage nothing could be filled in and covered until the local inspector from SPANC had come on site and given the system her seal of approval. Only then could filling in start.

They connected this rainwater downpipe on the front and the two on the back to create a common run-off at the rear of the house. The other one on the front was treated separately.

This photo was shot during the initial setting up of the ‘fosse septique’.

This shot was taken after work had just started on digging a trench from the front to the back of the building to accept the green ‘gaine’ (plastic conduit) to take the cable for the swimming pool pump.

The next shot shows the start of the infilling process to bury the whole system underground.

Here’s how things looked at the end of the day – much tidier but not yet finished. The team will be back to complete their ‘terrassement’ (landscaping) tomorrow.

The next two shots show the two trenches with the connections ready for electricity and water.

Here’s what it now looks like out at the back of the house viewed from the living room doors.

This is the sight that greeted me when I popped in to see how the electrician was doing just after lunchtime. I’m amazed that such a tiny house can have such a complex electrical system with so many breakers. I think that mostly this is down to the heat pump.

This is how things looked at the end of the day after the electrician had finished. But his job is far from over as he’ll be back to connect up the heat pump and hot water system when the floor levelling screed has been run and the heat pump and plumbing have been installed.

To finish off, one more shot of the exterior of the house from ground level.

As I mentioned earlier, the septic tank guys will be back tomorrow to finish tidying up the ground and on Wednesday Enedis are due to connect the house’s electrical supply. However, I’ll be surprised if this will go ahead as firstly it’s supposed to be ready for use, which obviously it isn’t just yet, and it’s supposed to have been inspected, which it hasn’t been. I’ll be interested to see what happens… 😉