Good job! Lafaele and Tuiala did a good job of getting the rest of the cement work done while I was off living it up in foreign ports of call.
I was starting from the beginning, so the first job was, as usual, to get the sensor aligned and ready to go. Since it was just me doing the work I employed a trusty piece of duct tape to hold the end of the alignment string for me.
Lafaele was a wild man with the weed eater, which was how the entire lawn was mowed(!), so he poured a pad of cement around the sensor vault to keep from bumping directly up against it while cutting the grass. I started sweating a bit when I first saw the pad, but, as it turned out, the pad didn't end up preventing the lid from being put on the barrel. The foam just needed to be trimmed a little to allow the locking ring handle to be operated.
I'd had trouble threading the cable that connected the sensor to the digitizer, and the small plastic tube that ran between the station box and the vault (to check for water in the vault without having to open it up) through the flat blue hose that ran between the station box and the sensor vault on all three sties that we'd gotten up and running -- and the flat hoses at those sites were pretty short. This hose was going to be a be a bit longer. I panicked for a while then came up with a piece of PVC pipe that I was able to get pushed through the flat hose. When the pipe was through I taped the cable and small hose to the end of it, started pulling on the other end, and was able to clam down.
I got the bulk of the station equipment set up and running during the day. I drilled a hole in the side of the station box (in the lower right-hand corner in the picture below) and glued some PVC fittings to it to give the GPS cable and the two solar panel wires a place to pass through. The fitting was large enough for the connectors on the ends of the wires to pass through. I used plumber's putty to pack around the wires to seal it up.
It's Vailima Time! I was dehydrated by the end of the day. I got the station running enough to leave it overnight to collect a little data.
2018-03-03