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Home > Sites > Potter Valley North > April 20, 2024

Summary

Annual check up

Details

Service/Install Description for 20 April 2024, Lisa Katz and Sarah Burnett:

• Arrived onsite and the pyranometer was unplugged, and there was bright blue dried goo inside the cable pins. Attempted to remove the goo, we releveled the pyranometer plate, cleaned the pyranometer, and plugged the cable back into the sensor. Unfortunately, the sensor did not come back on.
• Used a wet paper towel to wash bird droppings off the pyranometer plate and cross arms, also inside the enclosure where wasps had tried to colonize the roof and there were unidentifiable specks and dirt in the bottom of the enclosure.
• The tipping bucket funnel was perfectly clean on arrival. We cleaned a little bit of soil out of the tipper. Since the tipping bucket pole is still perfectly level, we just releveled the tipping bucket even though it was nearly perfectly level when we arrived.
• Sarah cleaned off some gross bug stuff that had accumulated inside the gland of the HygroVue.
• We washed off the solar panel, even though there wasn’t much on it but dust and pollen.
• Although we had a RS 232 cable, we were unable to successfully connect to the datalogger. We downloaded the data from the card. The card is the large size.
• We accidentally unwired the 5cm soil temperature sensor and left it unwired overnight, went back the next day to rewire it. The sensor was reporting as expected when we left.
• We took measurements of the heights of all the sensors and recorded serial numbers because that had never been done before.
• We sprayed a significant amount of Raid on the two wasps nests underneath the solar panel and onto the bottom of the enclosure where the wasps were going in and out of the soil sensor gland.
• The fence around the station looked to be holding up well. There is a sizeable gap near the entry way where people have ducked between the barbed wire to go in and out of the fenced in area without opening the gate.
• The datalogger wiring is chaotic and Lisa didn’t have enough patience to do a wiring diagram.

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