Monday, January 4, 2016

Outages continue at both DR buoys

[The following is a back-dated share of an email update I sent out on January 4th, 2016, relating to outages observed at both of the newly-deployed Dominican buoys.]
I thought I should sent a followup, because both Dominican buoys are offline now.

The Catuan Wreck (Boca Chica) buoy went offline at UTC 1030 on December 30th, about five and a half days ago.  In addition to the 30-hour power outage (Dec 27th - 28th) I was describing below, there was one 3-hour power loss the day before (Dec 26th) that I had not noticed.  These two outages were followed by a 5-hour outage the following day (Dec 29th) and then the current multi-day outage which began Dec 30th.

Curiously, all four CWDR1 power outages began at the same time of day, within about 20 minutes of one another, UTC 1020 - 1050 (or Dominican time 6:20am - 6:50am).  I'm wondering if maybe this is the earliest time that sun strikes the solar panels strongly enough to generate some current, and it's knocking out the solar regulator?  But that is unfounded speculation at this point.

The Puerto Plata (PPDR1) buoy went offline on December 30th at UTC1900.  I have not yet examined that buoy's data records in detail.

Note that while I can confirm (by the missing record numbers) that the CWDR1 buoy really was powerless, repeatedly, since deployment, I am not yet certain whether the PPDR1 buoy is suffering power outages as well.  Until/unless I regain contact even briefly with PPDR1 I can't know from record-numbering gaps whether that buoy has power-systems problems or merely communications problems.

Mike J+