A day in the life: the Climate Chamber

Just to give you an a day in the life of my graduate work, here is a piece of equipment we use: it's a climate chamber--you put a test wall between two insulated open-ended boxes, and control the temperature and humidity profile to match the conditions you want your test wall to see.

We have very little official lab space; we're borrowing some lab space from another group (read: they haven't actively kicked us out yet). But given the appearance of our test apparatus, we've gotten nasty email messages saying, "Hey... you have a packing crate sitting in the lab--were you planning on opening it up soon?"

Incidentally "BEG" stands for "Building Engineering Group"--they are my dawgs, yo.

Next to our climate chamber, there is a "constructed wetland"--basically using bioremediation/filtering to remove pollutants--a couple of stepped plant beds with water running through them. Given the big grow lights over them in this windowless high-bay lab, it looks for all the world like a big-ass pot farm. Hey... maybe it will take negative attention away from our group--we're only growing mold in our experiments.