After a review of several issues amongst ourselves we:
- Redid the tower connections without washers on the 3 towers assembled so far, to better seat the bolts on the Nylock nut threads
- Tamped down soil under the bases for the 3x 35' towers (this required lowering 20' of ue that had been erected)
- Doubled up a few more screw anchors for the 35' towers
- Flipped the guy wire attachment point on ue's 30' section, which now makes it loose, but not stressing the diagonal braces.
- Since it was down, we attached the 30' section to ue along with the permanent guy wires and successfully raised it with 4 people
- HOWEVER, as we were tensioning just the temp rope guy, one of the screw anchors snapped. Fortunately, we had a second screw anchor in place to resecure this guy, but in the end we decided to abandon the screw anchors (at least the used ones that we have here) and plan on using Mantas instead. We lowered ue back down again.
- We added guy wires to d.
- We decided that erecting a 35' tower fully assembled would be workable.
Thus, ue, uw, and d are all at the same state of having 30' assembled on the ground, attached to a secure tilting base plate, and with permanent guys attached. We can add the top 5' to each of these to finish up. However, they can't be erected until we have guy anchor points that we are happy with. We will retry Manta installation tomorrow with the remaining parts that are needed that Bob is bringing tonight.
We also assembled 20' of tower c (which does not have a tilting base plate) on the ground. Again, it is waiting for guy anchor points to start going vertical.
We left the site at 12:30, having worked through intermittent rain.
Tony and William are on the way to Gunnison to return the UHaul.
This morning William and I returned the electric jackhammer to Crested Butte Rentals. They did not charge us for the rental, confirming that it was indeed a 'lemon'. They do offer skid steers for rental and currently have a few on site (if we decide to use them for anchor installation.) They are not open on the weekends.
https://www.crestedbutterentalcenter.com/construction-equipment-rentals/4455327
Upon arrival at the site, we assisted the rest of the crew with tower adjustments; tamping bases, permanent guy installation and hardware. All seemed well until an auger anchor cracked while attempting to attach a permanent guy to it. Work stopped. A discussion took place and the decision to remove current auger anchors from the field was made. Further discussion about future use of these anchors is necessary and is certainly an item for the SOS debrief.
William and I returned the Uhaul in Gunnison. The store owner had an outstanding unorganized collection of varieties including six boxes of pocket knives, full military outfits and fishing gear from the 80s. William bought a can opening nail clipper for $1. We then stopped at Tractor Supply (a roughly 30mile/40min drive). It was of acceptable size and is a potential backup hardware store.
With much anticipation, we await the arrival of the remaining items needed for Manta Anchor installation.
No free breakfast at Elevations Hotel.
Grocery store in town: Clark's
Address: 500 Belleview Ave, Crested Butte, CO 81224
Open til 9. $$$
More options in Gunnison.
Shuttle Bus info (free to downtown)
https://travelcrestedbutte.com/crested-butte-bus-schedule/
Weather: sprinkles several times throughout the day, then sunny. Temperatures were mild.
A mixed day:
- Manta anchors
- Found that we also needed a jackhammer, that Williams Form didn't tell us about. Tony found one in Crested Butte to rent
- Nevertheless, Chris and Tony found that WF also didn't give us a complete kit. We are asking Bob Wiley to pick this up on his way out tomorrow, but in the meantime Manta installation can't start
- Screw anchors
- Tested 2 to failure in this soil. Got motion of the stake in the ground at about 400lb and pulled out at 700lb. Managed to break one at about 800lb. This is close to what we need, but we plan to be safe and double-up at each anchor point. I thought we had enough anchors, but I think we've asked Bob to bring out a few more.
- In the mean time, we've installed (just) one anchor at each anchor point for the 35' towers and a few are also doubled
- Survey: I had some confusion when setting anchor locations (that depend on tower orientation), but eventually ended up pretty close
- Towers:
- All base plates set and staked, though some may have shifted as we attached tower sections
- ue: erected to 20' and secured with temp guys. Next 10' section has the guy wire attachment bracket attached.
- uw and d: assembled to 30' onto hinged base plates, but still laying down.
- both have the guy wire attachment bracket loose. It is unclear why.
- uw: Permanent guys are attached at top
- c: base plate set along with ground rod.
- All towers were assembled with bolts/1 flat washer/nylock nut. The flat washer prevents the nylock from catching well and even without it, the bolt doesn't protrude through the entire nylock thread. We need longer bolts, but feel that these will hold for now.
Today was our first full day of field operations. Accomplishments include further unpacking and organizing, confirming tower locations and site layout, linking 35ft tower sections for raising, setting auger anchors, organizing guy wire sets and performing pull test on auger anchors. "Non-accomplishments" include missing items to complete manta anchoring, low pull test results on auger anchors, bolts not fully captured by nylock nuts and not packing a few crucial tools.
Solutions: We contacted Williams Form about the missing items for anchoring and they assure us the items can be provided (via pickup in Golden, CO). We hope to be setting anchors soon. The pull test on auger anchors came out to 700ft/lb (+/-100ft/lb). Doubling auger anchors will increase load tolerance (we tension to 400ft/lb). The bolts we use to link tower sections can be used without washers (nylock nut is being used). Removal of washer will give us enough thread to capture safely. Chris and I went to the hardware store to pick up items other items we need.
The Ace Hardware is open until 9pm.
Drove from Boulder and dropped everything at the site:
- U-Haul made it just fine since the road (despite being quite rutted) was mostly dry. The drive took a bit under 6 hours, FLAB-to-field, including a gas break, a construction detour, and 2 construction flagger stops via Hwy285 and Cottonwood Pass.
- Completely emptied the U-Haul with 3 people in about 90minutes
- Completely emptied the bed of the the silver truck to make a pile of PI sensors, including the snow pillows
- Picked up the Manta Ray installation kit and completely emptied the bed of the white truck by depositing this stuff at the site
- Confirmed the tower locations as flagged during site survey
- Gave a tour for Erik (head of RMBL operations), who was pleased
- Started filling up a room at the RMBL lab with extra stuff (food/Leica/straps/plywood). Erik will try to find an empty cabin for us to store empty boxes/tubs.
- Done by 5pm, checked into hotel and took the (free) bus into town for dinner and grocery shopping
Taken mostly from qctables:
Radiometers: not getting rpile.in, tcase.in, others reporting (tried pushing scan i2c button, didn't fix) → swapped in radiometer with right id for longwave in, now all reporting.
NR01: updated PIC code and plugged into uw. Isabel updated the configuration so data are expected.
Gsoil/qsoil/lambda: plugged in with latest PIC code. Getting data from all, qsoil values are slightly negative. Is this a problem?
Tsoils: all reporting, data looks good.
Pressure: all reporting, no data in qctables because it's outside clip limits which are set for Gothic. Data looks ok in ncharts.
TRH: all reporting (just replaced fuse + housing for 13m trh, it's reporting now but not yet making it to qctables), data looks good.
CSAT: all reporting after I swapped the sonic head on 10m.c (and previous resetting of some EC100's using ECmon). Some heads are intermittent, but I presume this will clear up in the field.
EC150:
- all h2o reporting. Some heads were blocked by foam padding. (3m.uw died over friday night)
- alll co2 reporting, but about half are clipped. Hoping this will go away in the field.
- Note that, in the ECmon reconfiguring, I noticed 2 EC100 boxes that were set to force Tirga to 25C. I think these are all fixed now.
Pillows: working, needed reboot of cl. There are only 2 boxes connected. Saturday: Now back down to 1 pillow; pillow 2 doesn't respond, even manually. Don't know why not.
Flowcaps: getting data from both flowcaps. The second needed to have the power switch turned on its USB adaptor. Both are now configured to the averaging we want (30/30/300).
Apogee IR: all reporting. Raw values look good, Steve is working on debugging the surface temp calculation.
Tsnows: Currently plugged in to d and ue. (uw is done, but Chris is protecting the sensors so the cable doesn't reach.) Looks good.
Gps/chrony: finally started getting good GPS on uw, but just recently stopped getting good gps on ct. I'll look into it, see jira for more details. → ct fixed itself after I pulled the GPS antenna out to rest on the top of the dsm box.
Victrons: not staged, not planning to stage (actually want to stage at least one as part of a power drop test – Tony is building up power boxes for this)
Anything else I'm forgetting??
Today, I processed calibrations done July 2022 for Tsoils: 25,41,47,38,43,12,44,49,20,48,01,23,42,39,36,11,21,28
Of these, I have updated the PIC code to v1.08 (double buffering) and loaded the above calibrations into: 42,23,36,11,21,47,44
Of these, I have staged 36,42,44,47 into the "d" DSM for SOS and changed the corresponding configuration (which unfortunately needs to know which S/N is where, to distinguish the Tsoil temperature profile)
The remaining 11,21,23 sensors will be sent to SOS as spares.