It doesn't all go right

As the title goes, we don't always get things right.  Be it failing to recognize bad leadership in a community, installing faulty and broken equipment, or incorrectly sizing a solar installation, sometimes we just make mistakes.  This is especially true in the developing world where we often lack the resources, time and, most importantly in my case, expertise to get it right....right away.  But in the end it's ok, as always and everywhere we learn from our mistakes and hopefully share a laugh or two as well (so long as they aren't TOO serious).  And also, here the people's patience is infinite, being they have a lot of time and not a lot of people offering to help.  So in the end everything seems to work out, the water arrives, the lights turn on, the stoves work and most importantly, the smiles appear.

I bring up the topic of mistakes because I recently made my first notable mistake to date, and while being "explosive," nobody got hurt and we all got a little chuckle.  My mistake involves a wind turbine that I've been working on for Asofenix.  The design is based on simplicity and cost.  Using a $35 generator, a 6 meter tower and PVC blades we hoped to provide enough power to charge 1 or 2 batteries in a reasonable amount of time (1 day).  

The problem started with a lack of resources, in this case that we didn't have the money to do a wind study on the site we selected, instead we just climbed the hill and said "yup, there's wind."  Well there was DEFINITELY wind.  The problem actually started with the worries about the structural rigidity of the PVC blades and whether they would bend or not in the strong wind gusts, thus potentially striking the tower.  For this reason we moved the tower farther away from the hub and spinning blades of the generator.  We did this by adding weight (a big rock actually) to the back of the horizontal square metal tube resting on top of the tower upon which the generator was mounted.  The weight in the back shifted the center of mass of the system backwards, allowing us to move the tower back as well, far away from the blades.  What I didn't consider, because I never saw this failure mechanism, is that moving the tower back along the square tubing, away from the generator, increased the bending moment due to the weight of the generator AND the force of the wind on the blades.  

Remember how earlier I stated that there DEFINITELY was wind

?  Well there was a lot more than I had expected, and when we raised the tower the blades were spinning much fasting that I had expected, increasing drastically the force on the horizontal tube.  To make a long story short the metal tube actually bent in the force ofthe wind until the blades made contact with the tower, shattering into thousand of PVC shards.  The lesson learned....use a stronger tube, smaller blades and less space between the tower and generator.  We'll be applying these lessons this weekend in the second attempt to install our first wind turbine......wish us luck :)

In other news, I recently gave my first presentation / workshop in spanish to a group of campesinos, about the basics of electricity and how to install a home solar panel system.  About halfway through the 30 minute talk I forgot how to conjugate verbs, but I think they understood because 2 days later we supervised as they successfully installed their first system, saving themselves hundreds in hiring professional installers.  Now we feel confident in allowing them to install the rest of the 20 houses left in the community with panels bought through a grant given to Asofenix.

Finally, we're leaving in 3 hours or so to finish the installation of the water pumping system in Sonzapote, finally connecting each house up to the 5000 gallon tank which will gravity feed water throughout the community.