I’ve decided to start blogging occasionally about some of the unique and interesting projects I get to work on throughout my work-week. The first week of March has been like springtime down here in Charleston, SC. It’s been tempting to forward my calls to my cell phone, grab my wireless laptop and head to Folly Beach! But the fact is, I’ve spent most of my week at my desk working on some interesting new projects…

I received two separate calls from NASA this week. The first call was for a handheld particle counter (I quoted the Lighthouse 3016 .3-10 micron version and plenty of extra batteries). The second call was for personal gas detection equipment (still waiting to hear from the Crowcon UK engineers about operation in micro gravity environments). Those types of calls are pretty common, what surprised me was that these instruments are for the International Space Station.

The next day, I had lunch with a colleague of mine, Dave Kuck, who was working on an industrial air quality job for a diesel pipeline in the arctic tundra of Alaska. The guys up there are welding the pipe and mounting it on braces that raise it high enough so that the caribou can pass under it.

The welders work in small steel buildings that are moved with a crane to the next welding location. They are hundreds of miles from modern civilization, where there are no roads. They melt snow and ice to make ice paths for the heavy equipment to drive on. Dave is quoting a fume extraction system that can be mounted inside of the small steel structure. The fume extractor he recommended has an 10 foot articulating arm with a source capture hood that can be positioned above the welding point and extract the fumes before they get into the breathing zone of the welder.

He asked “have you ever worked on a project in such a remote location?” I said “actually, I quoted a project yesterday… outer space is a bit more remote than Alaska…”

: )

Another project I found interesting this week was for DuPont. They are monitoring their huge ducted air system for filtration efficiency. This will be accomplished by placing Lighthouse 3014P remote particle counters, between their 65% ASHRAE prefilter bank and their 95% Main filter wall to measure upstream particle counts and also downstream of the main filter to determine and monitor efficiency.

We are providing DuPont with some custom remote particle counters that will measure 6 particle sizes (.3, .5, .7, 1, 3 and 10 microns) with isokinetic sampling probes mounted at 45 degrees in the airstream. They are opting to write their own drivers and use the RS-485 port to connect to their fms system. We are providing them with the MODBUS protocol documentation and I’m sure our support staff will be able to help them with any connectivity or communication issues they may have.

There are a couple other projects that I’m excited about (including some smoke eaters for a new oyster bar Pearlz, opening downtown on East Bay St.). My intention was to blog about more projects today, but it’s after 7:30 PM on a Friday and I’m about to call it a week.

Jim Akey from Lighthouse took a couple of days off this week to play some Oregon golf with his buddies. I may go drown some balls this weekend myself. I haven’t played since last year, so I’ll probably just stick to the muni…