Friday 2 December 2005
Melt tank Clean
Over the last few days our plumber Jamie has been busy organising the annual clean out of the melt tank which provides all our fresh water. Although Antarctica is supposed to be a pristine environment all kinds of sludge builds up over the course of a year so every so often it needs to be emptied and given a proper clean.
The melt tank works by melting snow using waste heat from the station generators. Unfortunately the heating elements need to be covered in water to work so you have a bit of a chicken-egg situation - you need some water to get the thing started in the first place.
To get round that problem we use the melt tank in the summer accommodation building to store enough water to get the main melt tank working again after the clean. After letting the water level run down over a few days Jamie pumped water out of the melt tank and into a transfer tank on a sledge. He then drove it across to the summer accommodation building and pumped it into the melt tank there. It took a couple of days and eight trips to get the water we needed.
Once the tank was empty we got in the tank with a host of cleaning implements and set to the task of removing all the gunk off the walls and heating elements. Inside the tank we found two pairs of sunglasses, a handheld radio, a shovel, a couple of penguin feathers and even the label off a bag of mixed nuts! The whole floor was coated with a layer of brown sludge which we sucked up with a vacuum cleaner while trying not to think about the fact that this was our drinking water!
Once the tank was clean Jamie shifted all the water back and we were ready to start the long job of filling it again. This had to be done very slowly as putting too much snow in could reduce the water temperature too much and result in a layer of ice freezing on top of the water. After a couple of days of water rationing and regular melt tank visits we've now finally got it full again. That's another pre-summer job checked off the list.
Looking down into the melt tank, Jamie is sucking up brown sludge from the bottom of the tank. The silver pipes below the metal grills are the heating elements which melt the snow.
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