Almost a day and a half of digging from our friends at Hallford Excavating left us with about 600 ft of 3′ wide, 6-8′ deep trench in the back yard. Here you can see the trench closest to you which holds the two plastic pipes which exit the house and head towards the backyard behind the hedge. One of the pipes takes the liquid into the house, the other sends it out.

Below is a picture of the location of the manifold, the two pipes running to the house connect to the manifold and then the actual loops are connected to this manifold. The manifold was placed behind the hedge so that the loops could be laid in the back yard where there are no underground sprinklers.

Below a look at one of the three trenches dug to lay the loop, the three trenches are all just a bit under 200′ long each.

Below is a closeup of the pipe (loop) that is laid in these three trenches, this loop pulls about 4 degrees out of the ground and carries it into the house via a water / chemical mix running through these pipes;

and here is a shot taken from the back of our property showing the extent of the earth that was moved for this part of the project;

The brutal heat last summer was enough to push us over the edge, this long with the fact that pellets are costing us $2 a day and leaving the house with cold spots made this a no brainer. These are the house plans detailing the HVAC system, orange indicates ‘runs’ going upstairs, yellow indicates downstairs runs, blue indicates return duct, and yellow indicates supply duct. The red line towards the middle of the house details a wall to be put up, blocking off access from the garage to the downstairs, while the red line at the bottom details an addition which provides additional access to the downstairs from the room off of the garage.

(Click for larger view)

Before

(spare the comments about the paint job)

3 days later

The above was done mostly with a drywall [hand] saw, but partially with a circular saw. The circular saw did a GREAT job but kicked up so much dust. If you notice the top left of the picture you will notice a fan which shoots air into our open foyer and therefor the living room, dining room, kitchen, and upstairs [bedrooms], the house was full of dust, my son thought there was a fire. This cut out takes care of almost half of the trunkline, the rest being separated from the living area, will be done with the circular saw.

A couple problems encountered when cutting out the drywall;

Where the trunkline is to cut through the wall, its load bearing, also theres a pesky electrical wire. Luckily there is a wall 3ft in one direction and about 5ft in another direction which will help support the load when I take down a stud in the wall. The trunkline will have to move a bit to get around the wire though.

There are lights in the ceiling so what did you expect? Apparently I wasn’t thinking so I expected nothing. This will have to be cut and rerouted, hopefully without cutting down anymore drywall.