I ferried the water samples up to RPI and met Frank, Kyra and Jonathan at the MRC lab and we headed down to the basement where the EWB chapter has been granted some primo real estate. That is sarcasm. The place kind of reminds me of being backstage at some very old theater - rooms sectioned off by lumber and fencing and such. All kind of creepy. Anyways, this is where we had the testing equipment stored so it would have to do. I will spare the boring details and cut to the chase. After checking the 4 different specimens (0, 1x, 10x and 100x) it looked like 1x was not enough but 10x was too strong; by making serial dilutions we were able to get a rough idea that our bleach doses needed to be 1.25 to 2.5 times larger than we had calculated. Much better than my original 100 fold estimate of error and fairly close to being within the ballpark.
Had a long talk with Chip Kilduff on the drive home and we both agreed that the main value here is: 1. We will definitely need to carry out same determinations as soon as we get the system set up on the island; and 2. That we will need to have a number of different dosing tables for a range of chlorine doses pre-made and select those best suited to the chlorine demands imposed by the islands water. Fine tuning this will require at least one more set of rainwater tests and I have already started the siphon to drain the barrel and reconnected the diverter hose. Once the next rain comes I will repeat the tests using bleach strengths of 1x (5.8 ml bleach per drum), 1.5 x, 2x, 2.5x, 3x maybe up through 5x (29 ml per drum). With this info we can generate dosing charts and be ready to go.
Very satisfying - all in a days work.
Lastly, a big hello to everyone in South Korea reading this - I hope you are enjoying it and hope the English slang expressions I use are not too confusing. Yell if you need help.
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