Things have been busy. Summer research began in full swing about three weeks ago. At the end of the semester, my wonderful wife was bemoaning the lack of a cheap and simple water level indicator. She's teaching a wetland ecology course this summer, and she wants to install some small monitoring wells (piezometers) to have her students obtain groundwater (not surface water) samples and compare plant communities to the water chemistry for different wetlands (fens, bogs, etc.).
I took this as a challenge. I love solving research problems by cobbling together bits of hardware and random junk. This kind of bailing wire and chewing gum tinkering brings out my inner MacGyver. So I was poking around my lab and realized that one of the busted "moisture meters" I grabbed from a garden store might work. The moisture meter is probably worth its own blog post - but I threw together a quick video to describe what I was doing. The production value is pretty low here: I went for speed, not quality...
DIY Water Level Indicator from Matt Kuchta on Vimeo.
Bravo! Very nice! The commercial well water level tapes are ridiculously expensive (and still finicky) so I love your cheap solution. Thanks for sharing.
ReplyDeleteThank you so much! This will be a great video to show the students as well.
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