Cold-load planning for hill farms
Why a 200A panel that has run a tie-stall barn for thirty Januarys can fail in its thirty-first — and what to ask your electrician before you say yes to the changeout.
Almanac · Twelve months of notes · Selected entries
Notes on the work, by the season it happens in.
An almanac is a book that tracks the same things every year and notices what they're doing differently. Ours runs on the calendar of dairy and sugaring and rural electrical loads.
Selected from the year. Twelve more entries are in the binder on the shelf above the dispatch desk and will be added to this archive when we get a quiet week.
Sap-run power quality on the rural feeder
When five sugarbushes within a quarter-mile fire up their evaporators on the same day, the local 7.2 kV branch starts sagging. Here's what to expect, and why a soft-start is not optional.
Mud-season service calls
What we do during the four weeks the class-3 town highways are closed to non-emergency truck traffic. The work shifts from the truck to the bench. Heritage planning happens here.
Shoulder-season inspections
October is when we look at every farm we did work on five years ago and re-check the bonding, the SPDs, and the lightning protection. The pre-winter inspection cycle.
Other months we mean to publish: February (cold-weather pulling practice), May (post-mud-season service-drop scheduling), June (NEK lightning storm patterns), July (annual re-bond schedules), August (apprentice-learning weeks), September (pre-sugarmaking inspections), November (sugarhouse install season opens), December (year-end shop accounting and what we noticed).
References & sources
- UVM Maple Research Center. uvm.edu.
- VT Maple Sugar Makers' Association. vermontmaple.org.
- USDA NRCS Vermont. nrcs.usda.gov.
- UVM Extension. uvm.edu/extension.
- NWS Burlington forecast office. weather.gov/btv.
- Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac. OUP.