The plan was simply to collect all the steam and condense it ("sparge" it) into an insulated and instrumented water tank to measure its energy content. Voila, problem solved.
Yes. It was intensely annoying to me that Rossi did not do this, or anything else that I and others suggested.
Here is another example of his pointless obstinacy. He did not bother to insert an SD card into an hand-held thermocouple. Lewan had to record the temperatures with a pen and paper. Rossi's refusal to take common sense steps went from absurdity to outright danger, such as the time he was demonstrating to the people from NASA. They said: "It looks like the reactor is plugged up. Nothing is coming out." He refused to check, nearly causing an explosion. Finally, someone pulled out the hose, showed there was nothing coming out, and everyone including Rossi fled the room.
Running a silly kludge of 50 pieces of junk in a shipping container? Absurd from the start. Why IH ever agreed to that will always be a mystery to me.
I do not think they agreed to it, exactly. Based on the lawsuit documents, I think this test began after many other tests in North Carolina failed. I believe the earlier tests were with a simpler configuration. This was a last ditch effort. I do not think they had much hope for it.
I did not read that portion of the lawsuit testimony carefully, but I believe that's how it went down.