DTES Street Market Reports: Street Market Report

The Canada Day Market started off with great weather, sunny, slightly overcast...

Not too hot for a summer's day, but great for keeping the atmosphere friendly and welcoming.

Later in the day, around 3pm, the rain started. This killed our 50/50 raffle take for the day, but help us clean up the park and open up the street without incident.

Lego Chicken Suit

There was a man walking around the market wearing a Lego chicken suit. Why? What sort of a question is this? It is the DTES Street Market and anything can happen. Even a giant Lego chicken suit.

The guy said that his project was called "Nomis Art Dome", and that there was a group of 81 artists that all made giant Lego chicken suits and plan to walk around Vancouver and make people smile.

I love Vancouver!

Ken Foster Exhibit

We had a tent at the market totally devoted to the paintings of DTES local artist Ken Foster.

New Star Volunteer

Just wanted to add a section thanking our newest normie volunteer - Mike.

Thanks Mike, your help selling coffee and pop today, and help with the table distribution made a huge difference in our operations!

Upgrades Beginning

The Great Beginnings grant from the City of Vancouver was approved last week, and we can now begin implementing some of the upgrades to market operations.

This week, we added people to the tent/table setup crew in order to deploy more tables and to eventually put up the "Art Mural" along the east side of Carrall St.
Next week we will put up tarps as a temporary barrier until the canvas can be purchased and painted.

Also, we added one more person to the early morning clean up crew in order to start putting up more fencing, and better control the 'early setup' issue - vendors that insist on starting to sell way before the market opens.

Also, we ordered the Poloroid ID card system from Avon Security Products - Canada's largest photo ID warehouse! The system should arrive some time next week and be operational and printing ID badges almost right away.

New ID System

The independent security is also being initiated.
OCS can not provide us with BST trained security guards, so it is likely that we will have to either directly hire locally, or find a nearby store like Army Navy that can offer us referrals.

Street Vendor Counts

Starting last week, prompted by discussions with CoV employees, we began a program of counting vendors on the three blocks of East Hastings St.
Carrall St. to Columbia, Columbia to Main, Main to Gore - these are the blocks where significant street vending is occurring during the week.

We have made two counts during market hours (see green coloured bar), and several counts on Sunday immediately after the market has finished (7:30pm on Sunday), and also at other random times during the week.

There is a fair amount of uncertainty with these counts since it is not always easy to determine if someone is a vendor or not. The rule that we use is that if someone is standing, guarding a display of goods on the sidewalk, then we classify them as a vendor.

Here is a preliminary graph of our data

Solar Power

We did a few diagnostics to our solar photo-voltaic system at 62 East Hastings St.
It seems that repeatedly charging the flooded lead acid battery to 13.8 volts for daylight hours has lead to a slight degradation in battery power. Reading on the internet, this is common in third world installations where grid power can not be used to de-sulfate the batteries. Sulfation occurs when a battery does not receive adequate over-charge for a long period of time. This is common in solar installations where the charge can only be delivered for a 8 or 10 hour period.

A test of resting voltage for the battery came up a bit short - 12.4 volts.
The battery will accept a charge of 13.6 volts, but will rapidly discharge to 12.4 before showing a more reasonable discharge curve that would be characteristic of a honking 200 Ah behemoth that we have.
The electrolyte levels were fine, so our conclusion is sulfation of the terminals.

Fixing this problem is not that hard, especially if the sulfation has not progressed too far.

Sulfation in Flooded Lead Acid Batteries

First solution is to use grid power and charge the battery (as an alternator would) to 14.2 volts or above. This is a little dangerous, since it can lead to evaporation of the acid. Must be careful to watch the electrolyte levels during this process. Also, this high level charge needs to be applied for over 20 hours. This is impossible with a solar charger, so we will need to use the wall power over night in order to try and beef up our battery.

The charging voltage of the solar controller has been increased to 14 volts while we diagnose further. Electrolyte levels should be checked every few days or so.