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This was one of our early works. It feels embarrassing now, the amount of time spent figuring it all out and the inefficiencies.
This the longest spur in the whole valley, it's over a kilometre. But some of the shorter ones are trickier. First you have to discuss the route with the 5 landowners involved and get a route roughly finalised and consider wayleaves. All 5 are excellent to work with, perhaps we are lucky here.
That gets you to figuring out the problems
1 At the house end, you have to agree with the owner a point where he can do the final section himself to his house wall and work out how many metres of spare duct to leave and how you can leave the end safe from sheep. (Nowadays, just leave him 30 metres in a coil on the ground)
2 This field looks moleplough-able but you will need a starter hole to be dug and at one point two other spurs join in, so a side trench will need to be pre-dug. (Nowadays, forget the starter trench, leave it for the householder to sort it out)
3 A ruined wall. It's so ruined you could drive a tractor through it. But it will need a digger to open up a trench first. Moleplough drives straight through, on the day. Trench to be hand-backfilled later. A ruined wall is difficult because it can look a real mess after you have finished. The only real way to tidy it up is to build the wall.
4 Another ruined wall, but impassable. This will need to be pre-dug from both sides by digger and the moleplough will stop, unthread the duct, moleplough goes round the other side, thread the duct back into the plough. (The whole kilometre needs to have as few joins as possible) (This was early on in our adventures. Today we know better and we would just join it.)
5 Fence (and permanent bog). Moleploughing can get no further. Unthread duct from tractor. (In fact the tractor spent 48 hours stuck in this bog and had to be rescued by another tractor)
6 Next section to be done by digger, exact route to be determined on the day by how boggy different bits turn out to be.
7 Bridge. Galvanised metal tube concreted in place. Next section is steep so digger needed. Digger does this section by reaching up and then going round and reaching down.
8 Persuade owner of next house to dig his own trench to meet ours. Work out how much spare to leave.
9 Fence.
10 Track to cross, so still use a digger into the open field, where we should be able to start moling again. Our first duct join is here. (Doing it again this would be join 4)
11 Permanently wet field. Need to wait and be ready for the right day. Moleploughing at an angle to the slope will be difficult. Was difficult, chewed the field up a bit, but as it was the landowner doing the moling.....
12 Concrete Track to get under (somehow). Our 2nd join will be here while we figure out the track crossing. Overhanging trees to prune. Employed culvert that had not much else to do.
13 BT join in the fun with some of their own cables. Get hold of the utilities map supplied by BT. Detect cable with CAT scanner. Map shows 2 cables. Can only find 1. Ask all the landowners and any random passers-by for more information. Chat about life. Scan several times and give up. Hope 2nd cable is redundant. Have sleepless nights until job is done. Mark the line of the cable you found. Never came across the second cable.
14 Moleploughing should be good on this section. This will be done by the farmer whose land it is, he has some land drains to avoid here, he says he knows where they are. Leave it at that. Be ready to be sympathetic if he breaks one. No drama.
15 The main valley duct line is here, so we will have to pre-dig a trench, figure out which line to do first, and how best to avoid collapsing our trenches and driving over duct. Good luck with that bit. Sadly a 3rd join here. Stop worrying about joins.
16 Another house connection. Ask owner where he wants to best connect in. Chat about life.
17 BT join in with 3 cables (which are all detectable). These are very near the surface, so we will have to hand dig round them to lower them, so that our own duct is at a proper depth.
18 Another side spur to consider. And we will be going sideways on a steep slope, and because of side-slippage we won't know exactly what point we will arrive at across the field. Pick a dry day.
19 Concrete track to cross (somehow). And a decent size stream at the same point to cross (somehow). More overhanging trees. Our 4th and final (we hope) join. Alkathene pipe through culvert. Stop panicking about joins will you.
20 This field is too steep to moleplough, in fact it's almost too steep for a digger. Get the man who will be digging it to assess it, and to assess the 2 little streams we have to cross. Land drains and those blue water pipes to find and mark, and thread the duct under on the day. Graham Knowles. No problem.
21 No access for digger into field. Persuade owner to let us take down his fence for a day. Chat about life. Owner readily agrees and moves her alpacas specially.
22 Arrive at chamber. By this point we will have accumulated 7 ducts. (Which will be showing continued reluctance to be buried, and an urge to fight with each other and anyone or anything around)
Consider what order to do all that lot and when. Keep talking to all 5 landowners. Also stuff like laying out the ducting beforehand, being ready for burst pipes, whatever. You need a plan B for everything, or be really good at thinking quick. And there will be about twenty tidying up jobs after all the farmers and diggermen have departed.
The result was an 1122m spur which took nearly 40 minutes to blow the fibre through, but it worked. A case where you blow the fibre from the house down to the chamber
And some highlights of the trip---
And some highlights of the trip---
Moleplough reversing in to a specific point from where he will pick up the duct and descend straight down that fence line. Duct already laid out and placed out of harm’s way and where he can easily see it to avoid it.
Overhanging branches problem solved at a stroke.
That was the section through the ruined wall. Tidy that up. The farmer says he intends to rebuild the wall one day, so you end up building the wall footings for an event that will never actually happen.
That’s what a stuck tractor looks like. It may have been possible for it to extract itself but for the duct that it didn’t want to damage (said embarrassed farmer).
There’s a digger in the distance. You can just see a 25mm iron pipe carrying 3X7mm beside the bridge in the foreground. Neat.
Return to backfill, reaching where he can from where he can get to. A bit of hand-backfilling to do because that slope is a bit steep.
Just beyond where we stuck the tractor, the ground turned to pure grey clay. Which meant the digger bucket got clogged at every scoop.
Some preparation holes being made ready for moleploughing the next day.
This was a particularly steep angle to be working along sideways. Some sections here were about the limit of what can be done safely (or probably just over it).
And we finally arrived at the chamber. Actually various sections were done at different times, we didn’t just start from the top house and work down.
The early planning
And just to show the original B4RN suggested route (red) against the dug route (yellow).
The original planner obviously had a different set of criteria in mind. Why follow the road? Why go through the yard in the middle house there? And if you like following things why not follow the fence (as we have done) at the top right there?
Other subtleties
· The red route correctly identifies the house at the middle set of buildings, but the owner actually wants the connection to a different building.
· The red route guesses the location of the 3 houses wrongly on the left side there.
As long as you aware of the extent you can change things, there is nothing wrong with the original plan as a starting point. But if you blindly set out to get wayleaves based on this then it is a waste of time.
The design process is more like
- · How do I bypass all those buildings and those tracks in the middle section? I am looking for a simple spur into there, otherwise I wish to avoid that lot.
- · That gets me nicely into that right field where there is a clear moleplough run across.
- · The left section is now influenced by the connection to the building that was originally missed. Another moleplough run across the fields looks possible.
- · You have already chatted with the householders and farmers involved but now you have a possible plan to discuss.
- · From there the 4 landowners involved pretty much decide the route across their own section for you.
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