Field Notes

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Tonzi: 2022-08-25 10:30:00 (DOY 237)
Author: Joe Verfaillie
Others: Daphne

Summary: Trees turning brown, New batteries for Tower, Rotated Tower batteries to Floor, Floor batteries to Soil CO2, New battery boxes Tower and Floor, 7500s swapped for calibration, work on OSU SP1

Tonzi
2022-08-25

Daphne and I arrived at about 10:30 PDT. It was clear, hot and sunny. The trees have definitely turned brownish yellow since last week. This was mostly a maintenance trip to service solar system batteries.

I wasn’t able to make a remote desktop connection to the Tower yesterday, but everything was running and I didn’t see any missing data. I shut everything down and prepared to swap batteries in the Tower battery bank sn BB-TT. We removed the 12 old batteries that I disconnected a few weeks ago. We disconnected the four batteries that have been running the Tower and moved them to the Floor system. We brought six Duracell AGM batteries (yellow J sticker) to install and two new 35gal action packers to hold them. Unfortunately the new batteries didn’t come with nuts and had M8 (metric) threaded studs so none of the existing nuts would work. I sent Daphne to Ione Ace Hardware to get M8 nuts. They only had zinc plated in metric so I will have to replace the nuts later with stainless steel. I put three batteries in each box and ran wires between boxes to form 24V pairs. Daphne sealed the terminals and used aluminum tape to plug the wire holes. The Tower was running again about noontime.

While Daphne was getting M8 nuts I worked on the Floor battery bank sn BB-TF. This system has been losing power as soon as it gets dark. I removed the existing batteries and put in the four batteries from the Tower in a new 35gal action packer. I put two vent holes in the box covered by screen held in place by aluminum tape. Daphne sealed the battery terminals and plugged the wire holes. The solar panels were still only providing 3-4 amps. I checked the panel wiring and didn’t see anything wrong. The old batteries didn’t seem to be in bad shape when we tested them with the load tester. Three seemed okay and I moved them to the soil co2 system. The one that was weak went into the pile for return.

We swapped 7500s for calibration. At the Tower sn 0418 came off and sn 75H-2669 went on. At the Floor sn 75H-2514 came off and sn 0035 went on.
Floor 2514 read: 411.8ppm CO2, 499.5mmol/m3 H2O, 33.9C, 98.9kPa, 100.6SS
Floor 0035 read: 425.7ppm CO2, 516.4mmol/m3 H2O, 36.7C, 98.9kPA, 99.2SS
Tower 0418 read: 393.4ppm CO2, 707.4mmol/m3, 29.9C, 98.8kPa, 94.1SS
Tower 2669 read similar to the Floor 7500 after swap but I copied the wrong screen shot. I cleaned 418 before recording the values but SS was still low, H2O high and CO2 low. Config files and pressure coefficients were updated and the Tower box was reset. Floor box was not reset but it was logging and numbers were reasonable.

I did midday water potential. It was hard to find twigs with all green leaves. I think this is the last water potential measurement this year.

We worked on combining the old soil co2 system with the OSU-SP1 system. Daphne ran a wire from the OSU box to the soil co2 box and spliced the SHF plates in with a screw terminal. She move the tipping bucket to the OSU post and wired it into the CR3000. I discovered that some creature had chewed on the solar panel wires. I rewired the two larger panels for 12V and put the three old batteries from the Floor into the battery bank sn BB-TZ_soilco2. This got the Tree1 FD chamber running again. I unplugged the 23x and the Vaisala probes there but left the Vaisala probes under the tree plugged in. However without the 23x to turn them on they should stay unpowered. Daphne updated the CR3000 program from the Tower for the two SHF plates and didn’t need to make changes for the tipping bucket since it is replacing the same model that was removed previously but was still in the code.

We left at about 15:15 PDT with a load of 17 dead batteries to return to the Batteries Plus shop.

Field Data

No tank data

No TZ Well data found

No TZ Moisture Point data found

No VR Moisture Point data found

No TZ grass heigth found

No VR grass heigth found

No TZ Tree DBH found

Water Potential - mode: raw