Success!!

It works!!


Nothing makes trekking up the hill of pain more worthwhile than finding a bucket half full of water at the top!


While we were preparing and building our 'atrapanieblas' (fog collectors) Lima was experiencing a very unusual winter- it was was warm and even sunny some days, hardly any fog at all. All the locals were saying it's because of climate change or el niño, and that usually at this time of year you can't see more than 6 metres ahead of you! However, once our construction was complete and collection buckets in place, it seems the real winter has well and truly kicked back in!

On Saturday morning Andy and I scaled the hill of pain and found our SFC (standard fog collector) had collected 2.4 L and the 3-D Box collector 3 L - nothing to be sneezed at! The water was full of particles that could be removed by sedimentation and filtration.  When we first arrived on site we could see to the bottom of the hill, but as we waited for the Kestrel to collect wind speed measurements the fog thickened and soon we couldn't see more than 10m in front of us! It was colder and windier than it had been all week, and you could hear the constant and rapid dripping of the fog collectors over the chaos of the shanty town below :-) The wind speeds the Kestrel was picking up were between 2.5 and 3.7 m/s - which is perfect for fog collection! (Any lower and the fog droplets aren't pushed onto the mesh, and any higher the mesh starts to act like a solid wall and the wind just goes around it rather than through it (taking the water droplets with it!). Now we just have to fix up the piping situation which Luis will help us with next week, and visit everyday to check the buckets and take wind speed measurements.