Thursday: easement / driveway / utilities developments

I haven’t posted in this blog about easements in a while, and never in a personal way. And I don’t think I’ve told any of the driveway saga here (if I have, I can’t find it). I’m finally feeling good about it again so I might as well do a recap as breadcrumbs for future me.

Back in 2020, we decided to build a vacation / retirement home. We picked a general location and started scouting properties online, and then T. and R. would drive over and look at them. We picked one. We hired a real estate lawyer in the area, who, entertainingly, used to play drums in Cordelia’s Dad (he’s really nice and really good at his job so we highly recommend him). One of the questions I had was: is there access to this property? I didn’t want to accidentally buy something we didn’t have a driveway to. We _did_ have a driveway; there was an easement. This is foreshadowing, altho of course at the time I did not know that.

We found a design build firm. We started working with the architect. That went on for … a long time. There was scope creep, and so we hired an engineering firm. I will not be talking about them here, altho boy do I have a lot to say about that engineering firm. We hired some landscaping people. And eventually, we hired a builder. The builder is _amazing_. Love love love the builder. Why go from design build to builder? Well, there was that scope creep. If you want to go around and find all about this crazy project, there are public filings, obviously. You can attend meetings. Enjoy; I won’t be at any of them in person.

Anyway. We’re approaching the very, very, very last stages of the Draw Pictures phase and about to enter the Pour Concrete Phase. We’ve been in make holes in the ground phase for a while, and will be there for a while. Don’t get me started on the well; that’s still incredibly depressing. With erosion controls in place and the conservation area parking lot at the foot of the hill relocated, we want to get power to the site. That requires conduit from the street to the building site, and the plan is to trench the driveway.

Here are the problems that have arisen along the way (probably not a complete list):

First the engineers (I said I wouldn’t talk about them; I lied). The not an electrical engineer manager said we needed a 1200 service. Which is insane. I mean, the project is nuts, but it is 800 level nuts, not 1200 level nuts. A lot of people went round and round on the load calculation, but the not an electrical engineer saying we needed that much would not participate constructively in discussions of reducing the load or putting in load shedding equipment or anything. We couldn’t get 1200; we were offered 2 600. And then months went by, and they came back and said you can have 800 and a bunch of people got mad.

This is the point at which I poked at the HVAC guy to find out if the BMS for the HVAC system could be used to shed load. From there, I went to the NEC and found language in the code that the electrician and the engineers told me was not there. The electrician said, sure, but you need it in 220. I found it in 220. In the meantime, the HVAC guy put together a list of We Don’t Actually Need This, and as near as I can tell, that got us down to 800 without needing a load shedding system.

Let’s call this phase the “the engineers don’t know how to do their job” phase.

Second, we went to the utility again, and they were like, okay, you can have an 800, but the conservation land says we can’t run the utilities across their land.

I had a really, really horrible few days at that point, because while I _had_ checked to make sure we had a deeded driveway, I had NOT checked to make sure we had a right to utilities to go along with. It had not occurred to me as a question. The site guy contacted the above referenced lawyer, but the lawyer at that point was like, you’re already trying to negotiate this I don’t have anything to add.

Specifically, the phone call from the site guy about the problem went to voicemail while I was on a plane to Florida on the 16th of this month. I listened to it that night, got up the next day and talked to him on the phone (because we were touring late, this was possible) and then had feelings extremely reminiscent of the feelings that led to me deciding to go dig into NEC on my own. So, what the hell, I dug into Massachusetts Law relating to conservation restrictions and driveway easements. I _was hoping_ to find some pretty clear, relevant court cases that we could use. What I _found_ was MGL 187.5 (I know that punctuation is wrong; you know what I mean.). I initially found it at a Mass Land web page about easements.

I sent that off to the site guy, and felt jubilant (GBL! Never mind). I had Solved the Problem.

Well, for the purposes of the town I had solved the problem. The land trust guy and the utility folks were not so easy to convince. So today, I was talking to the site guy _again_ about this fucker, because now the land trust folks are saying we don’t have an easement at all. Oh. Really. I knew I nailed this one down, and the site guy had turned it all over to the lawyer who was now taking meaningful action and could I talk to the lawyer.

So I called the lawyer today, and chatted, and this thing turned into a Three Highlighter beast of a problem, and he produced a multipage with many exhibits opinion on why the land trust guy was Incorrect. It is a Beautiful Document and I love my lawyer. He rearranged his schedule to deal with this garbage so that we can start digging up the driveway on Monday. Love love love.

If you are wondering, did the lawyer cite 187.5? Yes, the lawyer cited 187.5. Altho actually, we didn’t even need 187.5, because our deeded easement, if you pull together all the components of it (there was a bigger piece of land and it was subdivided, so there are a lot of entries in the deed book) specifically includes an underground electrical distribution system that is sketched in along with language allowing for it to be modified by agreement.

This isn’t the only thing we need to proceed, but it’s an important piece.

Breadcrumbs: the engineers

I’m trying to post some summaries of what’s been going on in construction because I apparently have been very closed mouth about this here and it’s becoming a problem in terms of keeping the timeline and details straight in my head. This blog exists in part as an outboard brain for me.

Once upon a time, we had a big house we were planning with a design build firm and the architect was getting a little nervous about the amount of steel involved so we hired some engineers. They were super helpful with the steel problem, but they kinda let a concrete problem really go unrecognized. This is probably number one on the list of complaints I have about these engineers. When we went to hire a builder and the builder was putting together an extremely rough idea of pricing, the concrete involved (this house is on a hill) made all the concrete people in the valley extremely nervous and so _they consulted with a bridge builder_. When I heard that I was like, absolutely not. We stripped a bunch of stuff out of the house until we got back into normal construction and proceeded from there. I was Not Sad about what we stripped out. I hadn’t wanted that home theater anyway.

The engineers were nonresponsive for a while, and had to be prodded to make further progress on the electrical and fire protection and so forth components of the project to meet a late fall 2023 deadline on draft conformance documents. At that point in time, we had a PV only solar proposal, and someone at the engineers (I do not know who) told someone at the builder (I do know who) they had questions about battery integration and generator integration with the PV array. Meanwhile in the MEPFP weekly coordination meetings, all efforts to get the not an electrical engineer engineer to even entertain the idea of integrating batteries were completely failing. He claimed he consulted with someone who said that battery backup for this house would require three container sized batteries. He spec’ed a 100 kw diesel generator with integrated fuel tank for “3 days”, which sounds like 1100 gallons of diesel. These never made it onto the plans; they were budgetary only for the control estimate. (Yes this is a cost plus project. If you are asking me if I know what I’m doing, I will cackle at you like a hyena and ask you if you parachuted in here from somewhere else because if so you should read more of the blog before you ask questions of that nature.)

When we were discussing — yes, this part is absolutely unhinged — where the wireless drop points in the house should be, the question arose about whether there should be one in the garage. R. said, yes, because I like to be on my phone in the garage. I fucking hit the roof. No, we need the wireless in the garage because that’s where the batteries are going to go, that’s where bidirectionality is going to happy with the cars eventually, we need this to all coordinate and be manageable via an app. And at that point, I started talking and emailing with the builder and with the architect about the fact that we basically had an entire missing system, and no apparent vendor for it and no one had allotted space in the mechanical rooms and there probably need to be _some_ kind of runs for it and so forth. Efforts to, oh just do the diesel thing ran up against the total lack of plans for that either, and so the solar vendor was contacted after I established they definitely do the kind of system I want and they attended an MEPFP coordination meeting and they are in the process of producing a solution. The PV array is much bigger than the PV only / sell into the grid array, and the rest of the system is flexible enough to do everything I want, right down to managing self-consumption based on time of use and everything. They are specing their next gen batteries and I am Happy.

We’ll call all this problem number 2 I have with the engineers: _they_ knew back in November that there might / could / should be battery and generator integration. And then their manager kept suppressing all discussion along these lines by having an allergy reaction to the mention of battery backup in any capacity at all. So now we are at the end of February, and our builder is (appropriately) sending them a Where Are My Drawings letter. They _can_ say, but the owner said design this system late in the game and said she knew that this could result in a delay, but _then they also have to explain_ why they didn’t do it back in November. When they definitely knew they should be doing this system.

Problem number 3 I have with the engineers is also battery related: they were completely freaked out about where batteries might be placed, because fire risk. This is _despite_ the fact that just driving one of my cars into that garage is going to put more battery in there than the system that was eventually specified. They actually went multiple rounds on, well, outside of the house? Away from the house? Etc. Which is stupid, because they really need to be in conditioned space. The concern appears to revolve around getting past the fire inspector, and that’s fair, but that’s a solvable problem (I’m working on it, obviously) and everyone just stated the problem and stopped. I was eventually contacted directly by the engineer who does FP and he pointed me at blankets, which was at least a starting point.

Problem number 4 I have with the engineers is that I felt all along that a single dedicated 50 A circuit was really more than enough for electrical charging. They were initially trying to put 4 in (2 tandem bays), and I was like, that’s idiotic; we have no trouble sharing a single 30A charger here at home. I quit fighting at 2, and eliminating one of those (along with the unnecessary HVAC equipment) was key to getting the load calculation under 800 without requiring load shed equipment. They fought to give me stuff I did not want that interfered with doing the project at all.

What do we have on this list?

First, they failed to flag a major problem with the design of the building from a structural perspective; it was identified by the builder. _That’s really bad._ That’s why that problem is the biggest problem. We hired the engineers to ensure this thing _could be built_. They didn’t.

Second, they _knew_ there should be integration of PV, battery and generator. They asked about it. And then they stopped all efforts to design that system until the _owner_ (me) identified the vendor and most of the components of the system and the preferred maker for those components. All they had to do back in November was circle back to the PV provider with a new prompt and we could have wrapped this thing up before the end of the year.

Third: they have refused to engage constructively with the fire protection problem they believe they have identified.

Fourth: they have made multiple incorrect statements about what is and isn’t in the NEC in a way that interfered with and delayed getting service to the site by months, and they failed to engage in a flexible process for winnowing down what did and did not need to be included in the house to get the load to a manageable level. They should have involved the HVAC person (that’s what the MEPFP meetings are for!) and they should not have been arguing when the owner said she did not need certain things.

Mel’s Drive In vegan option

I was on FB in a UO group and someone was complaining about the lack of a vegan burger option at Mel’s Drive In at UO Studios. I was a little surprised they didn’t have a vegan option? So I went and looked, and they have a vegan dog instead, and they have vegan chili cheese fries.

I know what I’m getting in December.