Race Rocks is an island without natural water sources – so every drop of water needs to be desalinated. It’s an elaborate process, usually producing no more than 1.5 litres per minute. Come along for a look behind the scenes!
First, we need to get lots of seawater into the main cistern, located between the lighthouse and the Keeper’s cottage. This involves running firehoses (the old Pearson College firefighting setup!) from the cistern down to the dock, and hooking it up to a portable generator (aka ‘the trash pump’).
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- All set up and safely tied down
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- Off we go!
Filling the Cistern
It takes several hours to fill up the cistern – leaving plenty of time for step 2: the desalinator.
The ever-fiddly desalinator
With a reverse osmosis system and secondary UV filter plus various pumps required for operation, running the desalinator is probably the single most energy-hungry task, taking baseline consumption from 1.3kW to a load of around 3.8kW: not something you want to risk on batteries alone! As a result, we try to desalinate as much as possible in the early afternoon hours on sunny days, when solar power generation can exceed 5kW. During the winter months and on grey days, the only option is the diesel generator – making every drop of water even more precious.
The main generator
Once desalinated, the water is stored in a big white tank next to the desalination bunker, whence it is distributed to the residences, and filtered one more time before it comes out of the tap. There’s still quite a lot of sediment to be washed out, as you can see from the filters I changed this morning:
Out with the old (right) and in with the new (left)
It’s been a busy day, but lots of tasks are now ticked off the list: thank you Cedric for coming out to help with a few things that required two pairs of hands!
Thank you, Cedric!
Ecological Notes:
- One of the female elephant seals and the juvenile male returned to the island today.
Visitors:
- Cedric from Pearson College kindly came to help out with a few tasks
Facility Work:
- Set up firehoses & trash pump to fill central cistern
- Replace water filters in both dwellings
- Recycling and compost runs
- Topped up furnace tank in keepers’ house with 200l of diesel
- Moved large barrel of diesel to the generator room
Noted Vessel Traffic:
- The number of ecotourism vessels is clearly picking up ahead of the holiday weekend
Weather – Current:
http://www.victoriaweather.ca/current.php?id=72
Weather – Past: