Day 4: at a Man-made lake.

On Friday we headed of to Lake Caliraya. Caliraya is a huge man-made lake about 45 minutes from where we were staying. It used as a storage point of hydro-electricity.

During the day the water is sent down the mountains into a lower lake. A large turbine generates electricity that can be sold for a relatively high price. At night, when electricity is cheaper, the water is pumped back up the mountain (using the same turbine).

More information about Calirya: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Caliraya

The inlet / outlet of the water in the lake.

We were interested in learning the quality of the water that was used in this process so we strapped two 5TE sensors onto the boats and headed off.

An unlikely power source

As we didn’t have access to a generator we were forced to improvise. A handy student from UP simply cut a power line that was providing power to a light globe and taped our power cable to it.

Entirely safe.

Once the boats were in the water we managed to draw quite a crowd. A group of men from who were busy working on the road came over to see what all the fuss was about.

"The whole town's turned out. I've never seen them so excited."

These kids were very eager to jump in and rescue the boat.

Results

On the way home Abhinav was busy processing the data and generated some great maps of both temperature and electrical conductivity. The electrical conductivity reading reached 0.09 dS/m. It is worth noting here that the electrical conductivity readings were far lower than those that we found in the Moon Pond Test where we saw electrical conductivity readings of up to 0.24 dS/m.

Spacial temperature readings.

Spacial electrical conductivity readings.

Achieving a B+



Although we were trying very hard to get 5 boats in the water (to set a new record) nature had other plans. It seemed every time we were about to deploy the fifth boat another thunderstorm swept in. Eventually, after many hours of waiting we decided to call it a day and vowed to break the record tomorrow.