The Underground

Today's post will combine a few landscaping adventures from last year with our latest bizarre discovery. Though we never fail to call Miss Utility before any kind of digging, we continue to find a lot of things under our lawn that are definitely beyond the scope of a check. It always leaves me wondering what our yard used to look like before we moved in (going on 12 years now).

I don't even remember how we started finding these problem areas--I think it. was simply because the grass (or even the weeds that we call grass) was not thriving. We started adding compost and churning up the soil, trying to loosen it up to plant new grass, when we realized there was landscaping cloth EVERYWHERE. This wasn't at the edge of our property, where there had perhaps been gardens. This was under so much of our yard. Of course our lawn wasn't growing happily--there was nowhere for the roots to spread out. D spent multiple weekends slowly pulling it out and replacing it with dirt. 

There was no trick that we could figure out for removing it. Just a shovel and a pick and manually trying to pull it up. It came up in giant sheets in some places. We really do think that this entire quarter or so of our back yard, the part that we cleared out seven years ago. I guess it really was a garden at some point, though it was just an overgrown mess by the time we moved in.

By the end, we had quite a lot of landscaping cloth piled up and ready to be trashed. The grass seems happier already (or it would if we hadn't destroyed it while building the patio).

Part two of "what is under the ground" is this giant hole that emerged this past fall. Not a groundhog this time, we think. More likely the finally decaying tree roots leftover from the big tree that fell down a few years ago. It took a lot of dirt and stomping on it to cover it up but it hasn't come back since we took care of it in October. At least this one was easy to deal with.

  

And finally, our latest underground discovery--corrugated pipe that used to be connected to the downspouts. We did a little bit of pipe repair under our patio when it was rebuilt and it was pretty clear that whatever system had been in place previously was clogged/collapsed/non-functional. And lo and behold, as we were gardening, D noticed a sad patch of grass, dug in his shovel and SURPRISE - cheap corrugated pipe! It had utterly collapsed and wasn't connected to anything and was blocking the roots of our grass, so it had to come out. No easy feat, of course. Because we uncovered just about a foot of it at first, but we knew that there was much more.

Much, much, much more.

And then we found even more, elsewhere in the yard. Seriously what is going on under our yard?!

We couldn't get it all out because, in some spots, it went deep enough that we couldn't easily dig it up. But we pulled out easily 30 feet, probably more.

There was another interesting thing that we managed to pull from the ground while doing yard work, but if I say too much, I'll be getting ahead of myself, since I haven't told you about this project yet. So here's a bit of a spoiler for our river rock garden--with the giant steel beam under it. (What the heck was going on in this yard before we moved in? Seriously!)

The Magic Phrase is "Flickering Lights"

Well who knew we'd luck out and solve this problem so quickly (I mean, it has been going on for weeks but within about 12 hours of last night's blog post, we had an answer). So first, I have to fill in one detail that I left out last night because I didn't think it was relevant: a couple days into the patio build, we noticed some wires had been cut outside our house, probably by the big truck driving gravel to the back yard. A local electrician came by to make sure it wasn't live and said it was only an old phone line (given what minimal information I know about copper phone lines, this seemed logical).

Still, we had our utility service come out and check the pole as well. We were cleared and good to go--not an electrical issue. This seemed to support the fact that we weren't experiencing any outages (because if an electrical line to your house gets cut, you'd expect to lose power, right?). So we did all our due diligence and it seemed like a non-issue. When our power started acting just a tiny bit weird a couple days later, we honestly figured it couldn't be related, given all the professional opinions. Anyway, thanks to the magic of 20/20 hindsight, it turns out this fact is pretty important. 

After an email to the electrician last night to mention that the situation seemed to have worsened and that now our lights were flickering pretty badly, he agreed to come take another look since it sounded bad. After less than 5 minutes and without him even coming into the house, we had a new diagnosis. He pointed to the pole outside our house. A silver wire was hanging free, right next to the pole (we thought that was just a "support wire" for the power). He said that it was the neutral and it was broken. 

It turns out, if you lose the neutral, the circuit will complete by running through the ground, attached to a water pipe, to a neighbor's house and use THEIR neutral. So that's a LOT more resistance, which means high power appliances like microwaves and dryers will struggle to get enough electricity. He said to call the power company and say we were experiencing flickering lights at the triplex.

When we called to report the problem this time,  we realized that the utility even had a voice prompt for "flickering lights." Apparently that was the word to use--and the word we didn't use three weeks ago when we called them to check on the broken line (because, at the time we weren't experiencing any problems). Needless to say, they were outside our house within a couple of hours.

And lo and behold, full power! Dryer, garbage disposal, microwave, all running at the same time and the office power stayed on! Not to mention the dryer and the microwave sound a lot happier and higher powered.

So we have an unnecessary microwave now, but I guess seven years isn't that crazy for a replacement. Given that the electrician didn't charge us for any of his two house calls, I'd say we came out ahead on this one.

It's Getting Worse

So this electricity thing. Of course the house would start falling apart right after a big, elective upgrade. Here's what's happened so far--

• A day or two into the new patio build, the landscaping company accidentally cut a wire to our house. We had it checked out and were told it was just an old copper phone line, so we dismissed everything that followed as unrelated.
• About three weeks ago, a couple days after the phone line was cut, we started noticing that the lights beginning to flicker pretty dramatically.
• After about a week of making sure we weren't crazy or needed our eyes checked, we tentatively linked the flickering to using the microwave, but we still weren't certain. The office was affected, with the computer plugged into a powerstrip attached to one of the sockets being forcibly shut down. No circuits in the basement were tripping but a GFCI was. 
• Then the same thing happened, but the light didn't start working again when we reset the GFCI. That brings us to where we were during my last post about the issue.
• D did some reading and consulting and decided that the microwave was the likely (and also cheapest, though microwaves aren't exactly "cheap" culprit). So we ordered one.
• He also solved the problem with the light in the office with some tinkering that required only minor electrical work and therefore was permissible according to my general sense of things you should and should not attempt with no professional training:
• Apparently, you can test the switch when the electricity is off, to see if it still can conduct power. This switch, apparently, failed the continuity test (see the 1? that means no continuity, even though it was switched on):

• A new switch that we just happened to have in the garage passed the continuity test with those 000s when the switch is in the "on" position.
  

• So D swapped out the switches and suddenly the light worked. Go us! And with a new microwave on the way, we figured we were on our way to solving this.
• Then the microwave arrived. We took a quick peek behind the wall before they put the new one in, just to make sure there wasn't any kind of visible issue there that could have caused the microwave to break. Nope, all good:

• So we have this new microwave (we selected that microwave like we select pretty much everything these days, by seeing what the Wirecutter recommends and buying it, because we're lazy. We decided to final switch from black (to match our oven and dishwasher) to stainless steel (to match our fridge) in the hopes that eventually we will end up with everything being stainless.

• And guess what. The new microwave solved literally nothing. Not only didn't it fix the existing flickers, but they seem like they are getting worse. Now we can consistently predict that the office will short whenever we start the dryer and even sometimes when the heat clicks on.The garbage disposal even significantly dims the lights.

An electrician came out to take a look and he checked the circuit box, tightened some things, and confirmed that all of these things are on separate circuits. Other than that, he had truly no idea what to do. He didn't charge for the visit, at least.

Then today, turning on the dryer even made the living room lights turn off, then on, then off, then on again. This problem seems to be spreading and we have no more leads and an unnecessary microwave (we actually miss our old one, but oh well).

Any ideas? Besides trying a new electrician.