The Spark Between

True story: the fountain lives again.

Those not currently located in Madison can take this for April Foolery all they want, but I swear to you it’s true :) Wait until you get back and check it out, or go look at the FountainCam!

David & I did a whole bunch of cleanup work Thursday afternoon getting all the leaves and dirt and crud out of the South (caliper) end. Filled three 80-lb salt bags to the brim with decaying leaf matter. Yuck. Then somehow Jared & Jeni convinced me I looked fine afterward and needn’t change before going to supper?

Anyway, before leaving we started the 10,000 gallon reservoir filling, a process which Tim estimated at 24-36 hours. Checking back at 8pm confirmed that it took in excess of 3 hours ;-)

I stopped the PLC to prevent it from starting up at what it thought would be 7am, so that we wouldn’t burn out the pumps with too little water. Then this afternoon I finally had a chance to remote in, set the clock, bypass the switch I accidentally left off down in the tunnel, and away we go! Apparently, the PLC holds its clock stopped at 00:00 01/01/1988 until you program it for the first time. Clever trick to make sure you don’t screw things up like I almost did: it held itself “in reset” waiting for the clock to be correctly programmed. Very handy. (I say “for the first time”, because we just installed our newly-repaired power supply module on Thursday, and the clock truly had never been run before!)

Now on to spring break!