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well perforation gutter
Tuesday, March 8 2011
All my recent Arduino-based Solar Controllers have had a provision for monitoring non-panel outdoor temperature, which can be useful for determining the absolute delta of the solar panel with respect to outdoor air. But I'd never actually implemented a probe to the outdoors. The problem was mostly logistical: how best to get a probe wire through the foundation wall, and how best to shield it from the elements, particularly the sun. I wanted to use it to measure air temperature without any solar interference. Today I hit upon a solution that seemed almost perfect: taking advantage of the boiler's fan-assisted outdoor air supply pipe. I'd installed this supply back in 2004 and it involves a large (four inch) hole through the 12 inch thick foundation wall, terminating in a sideways-pointing four inch PVC L-fitting. All I had to do was run a tiny cable down this pipe, make it emerge at the assist fan (near the solar controller hookup terminals), and then I could attach a thermistor in its air-gathering mouth. Not only will it be shielded from the sun there, but it will be exposed to large volumes of outdoor air just prior to data logging events (which usually only happen when the boiler shuts off).
For the past week I've noticed an accumulation of water on the boiler room floor. So much flowed there that it managed to flow out into the hallway and under the wall to a large adjacent closet, dampening the carpet in both places. There aren't many places this water could be coming from; nothing was leaking in the boiler room and there are no substantial cracks in the foundation wall. There is, however, a four inch PVC pipe puncturing the basement wall near the floor that carries inside it the water line from the well. As with everything else in our house, this puncture was not well designed; it slopes downward as it enters the house, meaning any water that gets into it will flow into the house. I know that the PVC pipe is not sealed off from its environment and in places it is so shallowly-buried that the well line inside it has frozen (I've since covered these shallow sections with buried styrofoam). I'm guessing that the water I'm seeing in the basement is the result of recent thawing of groundwater that found the PVC pipe the easiest avenue of escape. So today I installed a section of aluminum gutter under the well line foundation perforation to channel water to the part of the boiler room furthest from the carpeted part of the basement. Hopefully it will find its way from there to the narrow crack between the slab and the foundation, where it can drain away (another failure of our basement's design is the absence of a boiler room drain, though there is a large hole where the telephone and electrical wires come up from below).
I spent much of the evening obsessively going through the 2500 lines of Solar Controller III's code, cleaning up sections and removing blocks that no longer applies (such as the code for sequentially illuminating LEDs as each of four temperatures are sequentially "displayed" on an analog meter).
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?110308 feedback
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