Hence today's experiment: having been reading (in The Manual of Photography) about electrolysis, and having thought evaporation would reduce the overall quantity of water, I bought some wire-wool from the local Homebase and put it inside my Paterson Orbital processor out in the sun, figuring the black plastic would heat up quite efficiently. Additionally, I attached a small solar panel (producing only 1.3V, but greater current than the 6V panel) and connected one end (the negative cathode) to the wire wool, and left the other bit of wire suspended in the tank.
At midday, I poured in 400ml of mixed chemistry - the results of post-development washing (so traces of Paterson Aculux 3 developer), the vibrant green anti-halation layer off the back of Fomapan film, and diluted fixer solution - and left it out for 3 hours.
At 2pm, I checked on the temperatures involved: in the shade it was only 17C; in sunlight the ambient air temperature was 22.5C; immediately above the black Orbital processor, it was 35C.
Solar-powered evaporation and electrolysis as chemical waste-disposal in the Paterson Orbital
At 3pm, I checked the quantities remaining; only 325ml fluid was present in the Orbital, so we have 75ml evaporation in 3hrs. Most notably, the liquid had turned from slightly lime-green to noticeably brown sludgy colour, so that's presumably sign of some iron-related process happening - possibly rust as the wire wool washes-off, but maybe some electrolysis as well.
Not bad going, but given that the fixer from processing 100 rolls of film is supposed to give 10-16g of silver, there's plenty of room for improvement!
I spotted my first wee bug(TM) of the year yesterday: a longhorn beetle Strangalia quadrifasciata.
wee bug
Had to stop and take a handful of photos, of course:
Ice through the trees.
It was between -7 to -8ºC when I shot that. Ouch!
Since last ~Thursday or so, they've been forecasting snow and high winds and there's been nothing more than a handful of flakes frozen on the windscreen and a very chilly day out yesterday.
Yesterday evening they were predicting -3C overnight; it only got down to -1.3C.
Right now they're saying -3C again at midnight and yet it's still 0.4C.
I don't think I've seen them predicting such a different temperature at such short notice before - and normally I get warmer around here too. Weird...
Currently, I've set up an old Sparc box running Debian GNU/Linux which polls the LaCrosse WS2300 base-station and copies the results to another machine to insert into the PostgreSQL database. This machine generates a JSON data-stream of all measured quantities every 2 hours and uploads it to my website.
Today's major change is that the graphs, which used to be drawn locally, are now generated in-browser on the fly using slightly ugly JavaScript, to save CPU cycles and bandwidth.
They are currently available for the last 24hrs' data only, although I'm hoping to change that soon. Meanwhile, weather underground has prettier graphs for anyone who wants.
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