Tanana Receives First Year of Fuel Meter Data

In October 2017, ACEP’s Alana Vilagi and Baxter Bond installed 12 pump metering apparatuses in homes and public buildings in the Interior Alaska community of Tanana to develop a sample village heat load by monitoring the 2018 fuel consumption.

In late October, Bond and Vilagi returned to Tanana with Jen Schmidt of UA Anchorage's Institute of Social and Economic Research to update residents on the first year of fuel meter data collection.

Bond and Vilagi updated the PuMA meters for their last year of data collection. This information will be helpful in building a better understanding of residential heating loads and of individual heating patterns.

UAF graduate student Elizabeth Richards and her advisor Sveta Stuefer discussed the use of ground-penetrating radar to measure the thickness of ice roads. They talked about possibly visiting in February to use a MALA GroundExplorer GPR system on the Yukon River ice road that connects with the new gravel road stretching westward toward Tanana from the Manley Hot Springs area. They received positive feedback from the people who work on the ice road each year.

 

Alana Vilagi presents the first year fuel meter data to an audience of Tanana community members. Photo by Jen Schmidt.