Obstacles

In the sub-pages we have -

One of the dilemmas you have as a group is to decide how much work you get done yourselves and how much you just get done by a contractor.

Here 3 or 4 people have struggled for some time to get a 4 inch duct under this walkway. That will have taken over 2 hours, so maybe 8 man hours for the job. At the B4RN rate, they could claim £3.

A village with an identical track to cross could have said to B4RN, we have this section that we can't do, we need an impact mole to go under it. This costs them £500.

There has to be a middle way. List these awkward places and get B4RN to give you a price for each one. The volunteers can still do it themselves, but at least someone earns £50 or so. We did a similar deal and claimed for some of our wall crossings and donated the money to charity.

There may be a fairly standard way of dealing with a wall, a fence, a small stream but you will come across something nobody has tackled before. Or you might not know that another B4RN volunteer somewhere has successfully tacked the problem you think you have.

It would be nice if your solution or your problem turned up here.

So you have an obstacle that you don't know how to tackle. You send Nick Hall of B4RN a short e-mail to ask him about it. He will visit and he may well have come across something like it before, and if he hasn't he is capable of thinking up a possible solution anyway. There are one or two others at B4RN who have previously been volunteers in their own patch who can also give advice, but only one or two. But, there are 50 other villages that might be able to help.

Copy the other utilities

When you come to a difficult section have a look at how the other utilities have dealt with it. This is a really awkward bit with a large stream alongside a high retaining wall. Electricity and phone have put pipes across at an angle to enter the gardens one metre down - there were about 4 existing metal ducts, we just did the same. It didn't look that pretty, but you couldn't actually see them from the houses.

Our pole at the back there. Had to copy the angle to make it look right. Scaffold bracket and concrete to anchor the field side.

Similarly you might find something like a phone wire strung across a gorge suspended from a wire. You might get B4RN's help on that one, but no reason why you can't do it yourself. You can't use their wire.

You might find a farmer has used his own culvert for his own electricity supply. He is likely to let you use the same culvert.

You have a really awkward section like a stream crossing, or over a bridge, for example, where it's going to be difficult to dig a very big trench.

If you redesign your layout of chambers a bit, then you can reduce the number of ducts going through that awkward bit. In the extreme version, you could have a chamber either side of this section and have a only a single 16 mm to cater for through the difficult bit (presumably in a 25 mm black duct). This is the kind of suggestion you can put to B4RN.

Similarly you can sometimes consider the use of 4-core fire instead of the usual 2-core, to reduce the number of 7 mm ducts you are dealing with by half.