Well, folks, all the piles are finally installed and have passed inspection!!
And if things go as expected, my house will be put together next week: August 28th-29th crane work stacking boxes. Stop by if you are in the neighborhood!! 
These are the piles for the main house. During this phase, plates were also welded onto some of the piles.
Here James and Brett are installing the final piles for the garage/ADU.
What was initially expected to take one day, or at the most 2-3 days, actually took a total of 9 days of drilling to physically install the piles and was dragged out over 7 weeks. The main delay was waiting for the rest of the parts from Goliath Tech to arrive. That took a full month. Once all the parts were here, things still didn't move forward quickly due to scheduling, etc. It seemed like everything went wrong that could go wrong. Remember the first day when the "expert" flew up from Irvine to help? Well, as it turns out, it was his last day on the job, which is probably why he didn't seem to give a damn about how the piles were installed. The lack of direction lead to a lot of confusion. While some of the workers had experience installing helical piles, they were not given instructions on the requirements for this particular job. Several of the piles were so poorly installed that they had to be redone. The way to determine the strength of the inserted pile is to measure the torque on the hydraulic motor. Well, the meter to measure the torque never worked, though it was assumed that the torque was sufficient because of the difficulty of inserting the piles to the specified depth of 14 feet. On the first day a larger tractor was rented to insert the piles because the smaller one was insufficient. While we waited for the rest of the piles to arrive, that tractor was returned so as not to accrue an unnecessary rental fee. When the rest of the piles finally arrived, another tractor was rented, but it soon became apparent that the hydraulics on it did not work, so it was back to the smaller tractor. The second round of pile installation went much more slowly with the smaller tractor and because more care was taken to make sure the piles were correctly placed and plumb. Removing piles for reinsertion was much more difficult than you might expect, so took more time, and some piles also had to be adjusted for depth. 
I still like the idea of helical piles, but would do more research before choosing to use them again. It would be worth comparing the various designs and the companies making them. It would also be nice to have a better understanding of the engineering that goes into determining the diameter and depth of the piles. The ones I've seen used on Youtube all have smaller diameters than mine and are usually inserted further into ground. I would imagine that a pile with a larger diameter would not need to be inserted as far to reach the required torque as a pile with a smaller diameter. But it might be easier to insert the smaller pile, even if it had to go farther into the ground.
With Noah's help I combined all my time lapse video for the pile installation. It is a bit repetitious. If you take the time to watch it, you will see the snails are still moving around the tanks.
During the pile installation, the first 3 containers arrived and were dropped on site. It was very exciting seeing them come down the street. Here is a short video of the box drop.
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| We went to our campsite on the Stanislaus River that my family has been going to since 1928. |
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| It was a wonderful chance to relax and spend time with family and nature. |
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| We had some great campfires and, of course, the required roasted marshmallows and s'mores. For some reason I'm missing pictures of Noah. Maybe because he was off much of the time photographing birds. |
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| Danny likes to brighten the camp with his jellyfish creations--brought to life (light) with solar powered Luci Lights. They were enjoyed by the other campers, as well as us. |
https://youtu.be/3bj1MBn9T6c
