Public Lab Research note


This is an attempt to replicate an activity.

Thermal Flashlight: Tech Failure Spectacle

by acnud | December 17, 2014 23:27 17 Dec 23:27 | #11479 | #11479

The objective of our research project is to look for the presence of thermal pollution from the Holyrood Thermal Generating Station in Holyrood, Newfoundland.

Our specific site was the station's Cooling Water Outfall, which discharges directly into the waters of Conception Bay, in the Atlantic Ocean.

We were limited in what we could do with our technology involving water as we were using the Thermal Flashlight, not the Thermal Fishing Bob, as we had originally hoped. We waterproofed the flashlight in order to take the surface temperature of the water at the site.

Our daytime visit to the site was encouraging, and we did collect data. See our posting about that visit here:

http://publiclab.org/notes/ckenny/12-16-2014/thermal-flashlight-data-collection-in-holyrood-nl

This video summarizes our night time visit to our site, when we hoped to take our thermal flashlight photos that showed the same results that we obtained in our first visit. Unfortunately, just as we were about to take our photos, our tech failed. It appeared that the sensor stopped registering temperature and all we could get was a blue light. The photo here and and at the end of the video shows the site with no temperature readings - just the blue light of the thermal flashlight.

video: http://youtu.be/UZ_3m8QwdqE


4 Comments

Please excuse my inability to take video horizontally!

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Is it possible that the environment was cold enough that you were well below the range that would appear to be anything but blue? What was the range you set your color range to?

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I guess possibly not, from the video. You should embed it in this research note! Loved the music.

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Our "tech failure" was that the temp sensor stopped working - was not picking up any reading at all. The light was just "on". The flashlight was calibrated to pick up the range of temperatures that we had collected on our daytime site visit...we think that it got wet from the sea spray...

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