Field Notes

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Mayberry: 2018-01-11 12:00:00 (DOY 11)
Author: Joe Verfaillie
Others: Daphne

Summary: Clean up of solar power system, swap of met multiplexer.

Mayberry
2018-01-11

Daphne and I arrived at about 12 noon. It was partly sunny and mild. The vegetation looked brown and punched down from the recent storms.

We cleaned up the solar power system and swapped out the AM16/32 multiplexor. The solar system has been losing power every night and there have been ongoing issues with spikes in sensors of the multiplexor.

Six flooded batteries with 2010 stickers (sn BB-MB) were removed and replaced with five AGM batteries from November 2015. These batteries had been most recently used for the Temporary Towers at East End this past summer. The solar charger controller sn 04350908 was full of dead ants and there was some discoloring on the circuit board. We swapped it out for another charge controller sn 0135002X and cleaned out the enclosure. I cleaned up the solar panel wiring running wires off the ground and moved the controller box higher. The junction boxes on the back of the 140W panels also had ants and remains of other critters in them. I cleaned them out, put a mothball in each and tried to seal the wire openings with putty.

We put plastic PVC pipe on the power line to the tower. We found two places were the power line was chewed a little bit. We taped these locations before putting on the pipe. At the tower we removed the old junction box that was full of wasps. We put on a new junction box, put in a mothball and tried to seal the wire opening with putty.

Daphne moved all the sensors from the old AM16/31 multiplexor sn 1430 to another AM16/32 sn 1236. Hopefully this will fix the spikes we see in some of the channels.

After the power was restored the met looked okay and the camera was restarted.
The 7500 read: 413ppm CO2, 563mmol/m3 H2O, 16.1C, 102.4kPa, 98.6SS
The 7700 read: 2.1ppm CH4, 55RSSI â€“ 77 after cleaning.

We left at 15:10

2 photos found

20180111MB_newpowerstrip.JPG ( 2018-01-11 14:48:54 ) Full size: 1080x1440
We replaced the enclosure where battery power comes in and gets split to flux sensors, datalogger, and HMP fan.