As the research program has become more complex at Cape Bounty, we have needed increasingly sophisticated laboratory facilities and increased amounts of power in the lab. This is not a trivial issue in a remote camp. In the past we have made due with temporary lab tents and used a portable generator, but these conditions were less than ideal and the generators were noisy, need gasoline and ultimately can be unreliable. This is the story of how we built our new lab facility, QUAWLity (Queen's University Arctic Watershed Laboratory).
With support from the Canadian Government Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC), QUAWLity moved from the drawing board to reality. We shipped up the Weather Haven tent and arranged wood for the floor from a supplier in Resolute. It all arrived in camp in early August 2015 and construction began.
The floor was first to be built. We are not allowed to put in permanent foundations, so we placed the wooden floor on blocks and built it with insulation and linoleum to make it cleaner and warmer.
It was a group effort to build the tent. Conditions were calm and foggy, perfect for handling the large tent pieces. These tents are very well designed and have robust metal frames and vinyl covers that are suitable for long term exposure. The tent went up quickly despite the dreary weather.
The construction crew, just before cutting the front door out.
The finished tent, secured to the ground with long metal stakes and metal guy wires.
That was it for 2015, we left the tent empty until 2016. Arriving in May, you never quite know what to expect, but other than a bit of loose material at the front, all well well. These tents create large snow drifts, but the upwind side is usually bare of snow.
The first order of business was installing the propane wall furnace. Dr. Benjamin Amann was eager to help!
We organized the lab into a series of workstations where sample filtering and handling could be carried out. The fume hood was a nice addition that allows safe handling of acids needed to stabilize some samples and a propane chest freezer means no more running the generator to keep the cooler frozen.
The last part of the set up was a solar system. Inside the tent are a panel for the electronics and a cooler for the AGM deep cycle batteries. These batteries are designed not to freeze so they are safe to use in this setting and the cooler provides further protection from temperature extremes. A temperature logger placed with the batteries showed that they stayed at -30degC or warmer, compared to almost -50degC outside at times. They were fully charged when we arrived in mid-May
The 300W of solar panels are on a wooden frame outside, secured down with guy wires. The orientation is perfect to have the wind scour the panels and keep them clear of snow in the winter. Even though we have 24-hour daylight during field seasons, the midnight sun does not charge our batteries!
