The Scientific Instrumentation Museum of Horrors
Chris Chambers is the primary technical support scientist at METER. Deep within the recesses of his office, there is a collection of scientific instrumentation we like to call the “Museum of Horrors”. It showcases the many instruments that have been mangled and destroyed over the years by insects, animals, or the environment.
This serial cable melted when it got too close to a sample heating oven.
We get a few instruments back every year that are burned up in a fire, chewed up by rodents, and occasionally we get one that’s been exploded by lightning. We interviewed Chris to find out how to prevent scientific instrumentation from being damaged or destroyed by these types of natural disasters.
Beware of ant hills. This soil moisture sensor got eaten by ants.
Animals and insects:
The single most important thing you can do to prevent damage from animals is to protect your cables. You can protect your cables with cable armor, electrical conduit, or PVC pipe. Even better is to place cables in some type of conduit and then bury it. Keeping things tidy around the data logger and avoiding exposed cables as much as possible will go a long way toward preventing animals and insects from ruining your experiment.
A retired ECH2O10 that was hit by a shovel.
Lightning:
Lightning is not as big of a danger on METER loggers as it is with third party loggers (read about logger grounding here). Where we typically see people run into problems with lightning is when they have long lengths of cable between the data logger and sensor. Long cable runs act like lightning harvesting antennae. The best thing to do is to keep the cables shorter and do not spread them out in lots of different directions.
This soil moisture sensor was pushed into a rock.
Wildfire:
We have a few instruments every year that get burned up in fires, but there is not much you can do about this hazard except for watching for reports of encroaching fires that may be in your surrounding area and evacuating important instrumentation.
A data logger that was struck by lighting.
Flooding:
The worst killer of data loggers is flooding. We have a lot of customers that try and bury their loggers, and that’s generally a terrible idea. Unless you can guarantee the logger will be waterproofed and put some desiccant inside the box, it will probably end badly. There are a few scientists out there that have done a really good job of waterproofing, but they generally spend almost as much effort and money waterproofing as they do purchasing the actual logger.
There’s always going to be some risk to your scientific instrumentation because you’re installing it outside, but hopefully, these tips will help you avoid disaster and keep your system out of the museum of horrors.
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