We are tackling the site work on our project while we wait for our plan set revisions from the city to go back through our engineers and draftsman.  The site work includes undergrounding the utilities.  By code we have to underground the electrical, cable and phone to the house when doing this type of renovation.

The traditional method of undergrounding would be to break up the approximately 50’ of concrete and causeway from the telephone pole to the existing meter box.  To avoid breaking up the perfectly good concrete in front of our house, we decided to relocate the meter box on the other side of the building and trench the front yard instead.  While we had the trench open, we also replaced the sewer line and added irrigation and lighting conduit.

Just thinking about the carbon associated with breaking up perfectly good concrete led to a far greener and greener($) solution:

• Saved about 25 linear feet of concrete and even trenched under the existing 2’ to get to the pole.
• The city charges $30/linear foot to place conduit under public easement (we paid $64 in taxes vs $1,500)
• The existing meter box can now be reused as a submeter (it would have been discarded)
• Didn’t have to dig another trench to replace the sewer line
• Eliminated the redundancy and waste of a powerpole by doing the undergrounding first (about $1,000)

A good start to the project.  We are looking forward to the plans coming back out of the city so we can move on to deconstruction

Tags: Affordable, Case Study, engineering, environmental, Landscape, Zero Carbon

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