As some of you might remember, we built our own DIY excavator back in May/June of last year. Since then, it hasn’t gotten much use. The main reason for this is that the workers that we’ve hired are more familiar digging with hand tools than with the excavator, so they seem to avoid using it. And up until now, the projects that needed digging have all been construction projects where I was relying heavily on the workers.

But as we get more into the electrical wiring and landscaping phases, I am doing more of this stuff on my own and the excavator is becoming a big help.

So I thought I would post some photos of a dig we did yesterday for running the cable from the solar panels to one of the pump sheds underground.

It is really a small excavator, but this is actually quite useful for moving it through the smaller pathways of our land and digging small trenches. For most of the previous digging we’ve done, it involved moving hundreds if not thousands of tonnes of soil to make the pond, and for the little bit of trenching we did previously, we happened to have the larger rental excavator around working on bigger stuff, so we just used it.

For yesterday, I asked K’Tanawat to try his hand at using it, figuring that if he gets more comfortable with it then I might be able to delegate some of the other trenching required.

One interesting little tidbit was that since the pond edge sloped off to the left, the excavator was on a very uneven surface. This didn’t cause much problem since it is on adjustable steel “claws” in the front. We just raised up the right one to level it out the front of the platform and it worked out quite well:

In the end, the trench got dug without too much effort. And I didn’t pull my back out digging it, either. 😉

Here are some pictures with the NYY (direct burial) cable laid down inside:

For comparison, I asked the foreman how long it would take to have dug this by hand with one person digging. (Since one person can do the digging with the excavator.) He said that since the soil is such sticky clay, he would estimate that it would take at least a whole day. (Sorry for my funny English here, but the Thai work for “clay” is “sticky soil”, and the workers were commenting that this was “very very sticky” kind of clay.)

Here is a close-up of the sticky clay soil in this trench:

Digging through it is like digging through stiff putty.

On the excavator, it took us about 4-5 hours, which isn’t as huge a savings in time as I might have imagined. But then again, the workers are already very experienced with the shovel, and we are still beginners with the excavator. I am guessing that we could probably cut this time in half if I was on the 15th or 20th dig with this machine. And besides, even if it is only a factor of 2x faster with the excavator, it is still much much easier. 🙂