Harsh weather conditions affect quality and yield in grapevines.
Complex grape vine weather conditions have been affecting quality and yield in a Washington vineyard. To protect the future of the vineyard, growers planned to conduct a study over a 7 month period that involved wrapping plastic covers around their grapevines to record the effects and differences from the covered and uncovered grapes.
To accurately study their vineyard’s microclimate, the owners wanted a low-cost data logging system to record the ambient temperatures. They were looking for affordable USB temperature monitoring for Washington Winery.
Lascar, supplier of Praxas, provided a cost-effective and highly reliable solution with their EL-USB-1 Temperature Data Loggers. To help protect the loggers from ambient temperature readings from the sun, Lascar also provided two protective shields and protective caps to defend the loggers against moisture to an IP67 standard.
EL-USB-1
The EL-USB-1 can measure temperature within a -35°C to +80°C (-31°F to +176°F) measurement range and can hold more than 16,000 readings. Once set-up, via the free EasyLog software, the device will notify the user via its pre-programed alarms if the temperature has been breached via its flashing LED’s. Data can then be graphed, printed and exported to other applications for a detailed analysis.
The study
Using the free EasyLog software installation was an easy process. The farmers labeled one logger “outside temp” and the other “inside temp” to help distinguish one from the other. The software allows the user to configure their own sample rate, sample rates can be set to every 10s, 1m, 5m, 30m, 1hr, 6hrs or 12hrs. Once these had been set and configuration completed, the EL-USB-1 device was ready to go, set to record every 30 minutes for the next 7 months.
The results
Once all the data has been collected, the farmers could view the data from the study by plugging in their device into a PC with the EasyLog Software installed. From here they could download all the data recorded for analysis. Still using the EasyLog Software, the farmers were able to view, graph, analyse and send on all the data collected on the built-in software.
The data collected from the study benefited the winery’s temperature monitoring in many ways, not only was this a low-cost, easy-to-use no no-maintenance needed option but it also provided a full start-to-finish data logging solution. The winery felt that the setup and data collection were both simple and reliable and felt that the logger met all of the study’s requirements for the time period.