After devotions at the site, everyone got right to work on the various jobs they were doing at quitting time yesterday.Since the internet is still not working at the duplex, I again took my laptop with me today to access email and to send reports via the site internet connection.

With the electrical completed in the phasor room, Brian and Philip now installed the conduits for the control wiring to the phasor. Paul and Bruce continued installing the electrical conduits for the two air handlers in the loft.

Steven and Jake continued installation of the cool air ducting. This job will take a couple more days.

Jim began pressure testing of the north cooling coils and its associated condensing unit and the interconnecting lines. He soon discovered that something was not right. Upon further investigation, Jim determined that the factory had mislabeled the two cooling coils in the air handler. There were A and B inlets and A and B outlets, but as labeled the B outlet was connected to the A inlet and the A outlet was connected to the B inlet. He checked the south air cooling coil and they too are mislabeled! This means Jim will have to cut and reroute the lines he had so carefully connected. This will require another day of work to correct this manufacturing error. Fortunately, he had not yet made the connections to the south cooling coils.

Jonas had talked to Harvey, from WEB and they have decided to use four runs of 150 sq mm cable per phase to the 1,200 amp breaker. T

About the time Ralph and I were preparing to leave for lunch, Harvey arrived to discuss their connections to our breaker panels. We agreed on what had been discussed with Jonas. For the 800 amp breaker we decided on three runs of 150 sq mm cable per phase. For the 400 amp breaker we decided on two runs of 95 sq mm cable per phase.

Ralph and I arrived home about 15 minutes late for lunch and siesta!

After lunch, Ralph and I went by the salt company, Cargill, and watched as they ‘harvested’ about 18 inches of salt in the bottom of one of their salt pans. Large semi-trucks would pull along side the moving ‘harvester’ and the salt would be dropped into their trailers. I looked very much like the process of wheat being harvested. The trailer would be fully loaded with salt in less than 90 seconds, then the next trailer would be moved into position. The trailers would then travel to a raised platform near the salt ‘mountains’ where the trailers would dump their loads out the bottom. There were 3 semi-trailers constantly on the move. I think they could have used two or three more semi-trailers to keep the ‘harvester’ constantly moving.

This afternoon, wiring to the air handlers was completed. The rotation of each motor was verified to be correct, then one of the blowers was turned on.  It created such a ‘wind storm’ that everything that was not attached to something got blown around.  So much for the idea of extra ventilation!  Also, when the blower was drawing 26 amps instead of the rated 25 amps.  When the ducting is completed and if the current remains too high, we will need to adjust the pulleys to reduce the blower speed and motor current. Only one of the two blowers could be turned on at time because of the temporary connection (limited to 40 amp) to the 200 amp panel. It looks like WEB will not provide electricity to the new power room before June.

Daryl and Phil (from Alabama) pulled 5 wires (#8 AWG) into the conduit between the power room and the pad for the 600,000 watt dummy load, which is scheduled to arrive in a couple of weeks.

Philip and Brian ran wiring for outside lighting around the building. This wiring will be for several 150 watt LED arrays. This are actual watts, not effective watts–very bright light fixtures!

Brian and I started connecting the four 6 inch diameter coax cables to their terminations in the phasor room. These coax cables will eventually carry the transmitter power from the phasor to the four antenna towers. We only completed termination of two coax cables before quitting time.

When we arrived at the duplex this evening only Paul, Philip and Jake wanted to swim. I took them to the salt pier. The wind has been blowing fairly hard out of the east all day which has caused larger waves than normal on the west side of Bonaire. As the waves broke, the wind would blow the tops of the breaking waves causing salt water spray away from the beach. I had never seen this before, but it was still safe to swim. Almost immediately the fellows saw a medium sized (~18”) sea turtle and followed it around. At one point, the turtle swam toward me and I could see it even though I was not wearing swim goggles (because goggles will not work over my glasses). Paul has a GoPro camera with waterproof case. I am looking forward to seeing the video that he took. Although they saw quite a few new fish around the pier, the turtle was the highlight of this outing.

Supper this evening was biscuits and shredded chicken gravy, cole slaw, peas, pears and Dutch cookies.

After supper, Ralph and Mary Jane again took the six young men to the TWR office so they could communicate back to their families and girlfriends over the internet connection there.