Equipment

A workman (or woman) is only as good as his (or her) tools and I would say we have some pretty neat tools at our disposal on this trip.  Thanks to some generous academic discounts we are luck enough to have the following at our disposal.

Loggers

This small but mighty piece of equipment is a self contained datalogger that can record the level of the water it is in and its temperatures.  Some of the loggers we have also can record the electrical conductivity of the water.  These dataloggers can record over 40,000 readings at a variable time interval down to each second!

The level and temperature loggers are Solinst Levelogger Edge and were supplied by RS Hydro and the level, temperature and conductivity loggers are Solinst LTC Levelogger Junior and were also supplied by RS Hydro.

Sondes

Sondes are a high-bred between dataloggers and multi-parameter meters and are a serious piece of equipment.  They can record the level of the water, electrical conductivity, temperature, pH, dissolved oxygen and various other parameters.  This trip we have a Mantra 2 and a YSI 6-series sonde.

The Mantra 2 was supplied by RS Hydro and the 6-series sondes were supplied by YSI.

Multi-parameter meters

These meters allow simultaneous readings of different key parameters, such as pH, electrical conductivity and dissolved oxygen, of the groundwater.  

Our meters are HQD40 with DO, pH and electrical conductivity probes and is supplied by Hach Lange.

Sampling equipment

When we are sampling from boreholes we employ a low-flow pump system using a peristaltic pump and a flow through cell, where the probes from the multi-parameter meter are housed.

In some locations we are trialing a different method of water sampling and are using passive water samplers known as HydraSleeves.  These allow for sample to be extracted from specific depths within a borehole, or in our case a blue hole.

Our flow through cell is supplied by Waterra In-Situ and our HydraSleeve are also supplied by Waterra In-Situ