Round flashing finished..

I'll take some pictures in the morning. However the flashing guys finally finished the flashing around the round front sections of the house. Here are some pictures I took in the evening so you can get some idea.

Oops moment..

We were wondering in the morning why our pump couldn't pressurize our water tank, we gazed out in amazement at our water supply line... To our bewilderment we were presented with this sight (as seen in photo). Of course the next challenge was then figuring out who to place the blame on, myself or my father.. Who did close that container last night we asked each other.. The poor hose got crushed by the lock mechanism of the container latch and the pump sucked the living daylights out of the hose till it could no longer suck anymore..

Tank access lid finish...

We met a nice gentlemen at Joseph Kekdi's farm last weekend. His name is Laszlo (another Hungarian) who does steelwork. He does very fancy art work and used to work in Hollywood building stage sets for the movies. He came up with a good idea for our tank access lid so debris, etc wouldn't fall into it anymore. The whole thing is made from stainless steel to provide a lifetime of service. You can see he did a nice job and it will provide us good service. He put two nice lock connections on it so it can be secured properly.

Lock points to prevent unwanted access.

Electrical installation by Helco..

Today was just smiles all around. When the Helco truck pulled up I was just thrilled. Not to say we didn't like running our Honda EU2000i all the time, however this is just more practical. We would always pack away the generator when we left, it would need to be filled with gasoline about two to three times a day (when you woke up, afternoon 4pm and before we went to sleep).

The guy who installed the meter was a Canadian fellow from Barrie, Ontario. Thats close to Toronto for those people who don't know. Anyway, it took them about 30 minutes to pull the wire from the transformer to our galvanized pole and hook it all up.

Power to the people..!

Short posting.. We have power! They have installed it and we are thrilled..!

Rain gutters..!

So Ken was out today from Ahona Gutters. He and his single man crew did a great job today with the gutters. They completed about 85% of the job today and shall be back tomorrow morning. You can see from the pictures the quality installation as well the Gutterglove product installed also. This will prevent any Albezia leaves from ever entering our tank and messing it up completely. The system has a 8 micron mesh on it which prevents even the finest particles from entering your system. There are various different products on the market but Consumers Reports rates this as the best. It can handle 160 inch's (4 meters) of rain per hour. This is how much rain we get here on average in a whole year so there will be no issue.

The gutters are all the seamless design. This means they have a machine which spits out unlimited lengths you require. Check out the video I found on youtube showing how this type of machine works. Quite amazing actually. There really is no limit to the length. Ken has done 142 feet as his maximum here on the island.

Ahona gutters truck and trailer.

Seamless gutter machine.

Gutterglove top view.

Gutterglove bottom view.

Installed Gutterglove.

Installed Gutterglove.

Installed Gutterglove.

Video of how a seamless gutter machine works.

Waterworks screwed down...

Tonight we screwed to the floor the water pump, UV filter & filter cartridges. They were mounted to as per our plumbers suggested locations for optimum hookup. The feed from the tank will be 1 1/2inch line. We still need to drill a hole in the cement wall which is 2 inch's.

The Trojan UV system is quite sophisticated looking. It has a control panel which counts down the days. The bulb lasts 365 days before it lets you know with an alarm. So thats handy.

Just want to make it clear to everyone that we're going to be drinking this water. We will of course have the water tested once we come back to confirm its quality, etc. However rain water is in many regards much better then well water or city water. Its much softer and better to wash your hair, clothes, dishes with. There are no heavy metals and other bad substances. I have a detailed book on the topic. If you put out a clean bowl while its raining, you can drink that water pretty much anywhere. We're in the middle of the pacific, so pollution is a non issue here. The volcano's fumes don't come in our direction at all here on this side of the island so thats also not a factor.

Groundfos 1hp waterpump and 20 gallon (75 liter) fiberglass watertank.

Mounted water filter system. Will be 5 micron, 1 micron & carbon filter on last one.

Mounted Trojan UV filtration system.

Skylight flashing..

The two guys working on the flashing made good progress today on the skylight area. You can see the almost completed result here. We're thrilled with the result so far as the blue tarp over the skylights was getting a little tiring. Its true the sky was blue always, even in the middle of the night.

Waterproofing & potable water..

So today we had George back (he just loves the punishment) and he spent half the day painting our concrete water tank walls with the Tamms Hey'DI K-11 waterproofing / potable water product. This also needs to be mixed with Tamms Hey'DI SB as well. This is a latex based additive which helps it bond better to the cement wall and provide other qualities.

The coverage worked out much better then we anticipated on our walls. So we will be able to do the walls as well as the floor which is good news indeed.

Tank final cleaning..

Today was the day which we have been finally putting off and off. I called around and inquired about having our concrete catchment tank cleaned but couldn't find anyone who would return my calls or interested in the job. So we rented a very good (made in Germany) vacuum which is ideally suited for sucking up water. The whole task was a challenge. We hired a guy who was helping our flashing people and lives in the neighbourhood as an extra hand. My dad was vacuuming in the basement, George was handing up the vacuum to me who lifted it out of the whole and dumped it out. We got lots of crud out and got it almost completely dry. The saw dust from all the formwork we were cutting out was still down there, as well as all the cement residue when we poured the top of the slab.

The cockroaches were not really present anymore, they don't seem to like the place anymore. I guess there are no more places to hide. Plus we had kept the access ports closed completely as well as the tank access door. So there were no places for new ones to come in.

After many loads of dumping out sludge and dirty water from our vacuum came the next step. Power washing! This proves to be a challenge for many reasons:

• we don't have a large supply of water to feed a power washer
• water pressure can only provided by a electric sump pump
• we used 2x 50 gallon drums of water
• working in 3 1/2 feet (106cm) of space is difficult
• power washer hose needs to reach to all edges of tank since its gas powered and can't be inside tank
• working with a light and the high power of the power washer is problematic
• your glasses always fog up while working in the tank since the humidity is 99% down there makes any work difficult
• as you spray the ceiling, walls and floor the water turns into a fine mist and the air is then 100% humid and it looks like your working in a fog cutting visibility to near zero
• there are probably 100 other reasons why this job was totally unpleasant

So all in all we had a successful day. Episodes of the tv series on Discovery channel called Dirty Jobs came to mind several times.

Waterworks..

We started to layout our filtering system for our watertank today as well. I banged my head rather nicely in that p-trap square plug rather nicely as well. I had my regular Tilley hat on and I didn't see the thing when I entered. Anyway, lesson learned to use our hard hat even in this area.

20" three stage filtering system. Will have 20, 5, 1 micron filters.

20 gallon pressure tank on the left and our 3/4 HP groundfos 220v pump.

UV filter from Trojan.

Living room window frame installation..

Today we finally got around to building our aluminium frames for our living room windows. We got a much better deal (1/2 price) if we built the entire thing ourselves from the raw aluminium extrusions. Alumside supplied the frame, screws and a templates. We purchased a blade from Freud which allows us to cut non-ferrous metals. This includes aluminium and other soft metals. So we can easily cut this on our miter saw. You can see the end result below. We measured our final result and we were exactly square, plumb to less then a millimetre.

We will finally be able to finish the siding around these windows also.

Siding around sliding door..

Here we are installing the siding around the sliding door. We took some time off this afternoon to socialize with the neighbours and meet our good friend Joespeh Kekedi from Alohilani Orchids. We haven't taken a break for over a week and are going non-stop. In the evening's we are usually working on the electrical inside and during the day on outside work of course.

View of sliding door with siding almost done.

Screen door lock design.

Keyed entry for our sliding door.