Troubleshooting#

The salinometer can occastionally be temperamental. You may experience that you used to get consistent readings over three measurements, you now struggle to get consistent values, or there is a trend over consecutive samples.

Common issues:#

  1. The water in the bottles may be stratified.

  • This could lead to a trend of decreasing salinity over 5 samples. For example, you may experience that the first sample is always a little off from the others.

  • -> Did you shake the bottles before starting?

  1. Temperatures of the room or bath could be off.

  • Make sure to keep an eye on the temperatures.

  1. There could be bubbles in the cell

  • This can lead to outliers of individual samples. Always keep an eye on the cell before sampling!

  1. The bottle water may be too cold.

  • The bottles need to equillibrate to room temperature, typically for >24 hours.

  • Did you sample the bottles too soon (before the temperature had adjusted)?

  1. The conductivity cell could be dirty.

  • Flush the cell with MQ water and see if the problem resolves.

  • There could be grease contamination? (Possible solution: methanol)

  • Biofouling? (Possible solution: SBE Triton X)

Tip

In general, if you encounter issues during measurements:

  • Stop

  • Repeatedly flush distilled water through the salinometer

This often resolves common minor problems.

If heater lamps are not flashing despite 24 hours of adjustment#

  • Set the bath temperature to 36ºC.

    • Both the heater lamps should light if the bath temperature is below this value.

    • If either of the heater lamps has failed, the message HEATER 1 FAILURE or HEATER 2 FAILURE will be displayed within 15 seconds.

  • Set the bath temperature to 15ºC.

    • Observe that both heater lamps will remain off if the bath water temperature is above 15ºC.

  • Reset the bath temperature to 2 degrees above room temperature.

  • Wait for a minute.

  • Press TEMP.

    • The display TEMP tt.tttºC must be within 0.02ºC of the set temperature.

  • Press ↑

    • TH1 TEMP tt.tttºC will be displayed.

  • Press ↑

    • TH2 TEMP tt.tttºC will be displayed and must be within 0.04ºC of TH1 TEMP.

    • Press ↓ twice to display TEMP in ºC.

If you are not able to display salinity values#

Occasionally, toggling to READ and pressing SAL does not display a salinity value.

  • Normally, this is because the salinity is outside the range of measurements (should not apply to seawater or standard water).