Day 13, 12/11/13

This week had me doing quite a bunch of things. It started with me doing some research for one of my mentors. A session or two ago, I spoke of how I had to get dimensions for a loading zone. Well, the people who commissioned that project wanted to add something called heat tracers. Well, my mentor didn’t have too much experience with heat tracers, so he asked me to research them. Find out what they are, how they work, price, different companies that offer them and all that jazz. Then save anything that I find to a place so that my mentor can find it easily. Turns out that heat tracers are wires that can be put on things like gutters, pipes, or in concrete in order to keep them warm so that any snow that fails on it will naturally melt. And with a loading dock, one could easily understand the benefit. You put in the stuff when making the zone and then you never have to worry about snow stopping or slowing down your operation. After that, I went to a lunch training session were they were talking about grading. Grading is how steep you make a zone when building it. Basically, certain things have to be a certain slopes so that it is easily usable but not crazy expensive. So, you could have 2% grade which would mean that the ground goes up 2 degrees starting at the horizontal. Another example is a 2:1 grade which means for every one foot horizontally you go up 2 feet vertically. The session talked a lot about being efficient with your time and grading your site properly so that you don’t have to go back to your drawings endlessly. The day ended with doing so more research for another one of my mentors. He is doing a project in Stormking, NY. There is a boarding school of sorts there and they have a problem with Ammonia and Phosphorous getting into the wastewater there. So, my task was to look up things about Ammonia and Phosphorous and how to prevent it from getting into nature; all sorts of tips and tricks and the like. Afterwards, like the previous thing, I had to compile my information and send it to my mentor. That was pretty much the entire day. Have a happy holidays.