Field Notes

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Tonzi: 2011-03-11 10:30:00 (DOY 70)
Author: Joe Verfaillie
Others:

Summary: Swapped solar power battery bank, restarted co2 profile.

Tonzi
3/11/2011

I arrived about 10:30. The weather was warm and sunny with little to no breeze. The ground is still soggy and there are no leaves on the trees but it feels like spring is just around the corner.

The job for today is to swap the batteries on the tower solar system.

I pulled down the cow fence near the big tree to the east of the tower and backed up to the tower near where the computer is mounted. I disconnected the solar panels from the batteries and turned off the tower power. I disconnected the old batteries and removed them. I also removed the pallet under the batteries finding a bunch of scorpions, toads and mushrooms. I replaced the pallet with two board walks from Kevin’ s site. I cleaned up a bunch of the cables for reinstall on the new batteries.

I installed the new batteries – 12 Exide deep cycle batteries bought from O’Reilly Auto Parts. Four where from Feb 2011, two from Jan 2011 and six from Sep 2010. I measured their individual voltages before hooking them up.

Starting from the south east corner and going east to west and south to north
Date voltage Date Voltage
2-11 12.85 9-10 12.60
2-11 12.82 9-10 12.54
2-11 12.85 9-10 12.59
2-11 12.84 9-10 12.54
1-11 12.63 9-10 12.53
1-11 12.57 9-10 12.55

After reconnect the tower started up normally. I reconnected the co2 profile system and had to replace a fuse on the Li810 power line. When I left the system was reading 14.1V, 5A with the LCD screen and 4.8A without.

I calibrated the co2 profile system – pressure was 940mbar and temperature was 52.6C. The cal gas is 384.08ppm. The zero was -24.5ppm off and the span was 385+-3ppm (only a ppm or two off).

I measured the volatges on the old batteries after they had been sitting disconnected for a couple of hours. One was around 4V, three or four others were between 9 and 11V, but the rest remained above 12V.

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

No water potential data found

No TZ Grass Biomass data found

No TZ OakLeaves Biomass data found

No TZ PineNeedles Biomass data found