I was invited to give a Rocket Stove workshop at Nu Po Refugee camp a few weeks ago and gladly accepted. It would delay my arrival in Myanmar by two weeks, but the prospect seemed well worth it. In the end I decided to give a solar PV training too and in order to transport all my material there I had to hire a pick up truck and driver for the day. One hundred dollars, but well spent, as I no longer had any restriction on the amount of gear I could bring. In order to get there, we had to take the famous “Highway of Death” between Mae Sot and Umphang, which was so vividly described in my Fourth Epistle from the Border, see above. This crazy piece of road engineering has 1,200 bends in 160kms! If that were not enough to merit the above-mentioned moniker, during the 60’s to the 80’s there were many deaths from snipers belonging to the Thai Communist Party and local opium growers, two groups who sternly resented the interest the Thai government was taking in their respective affairs. However, those days are long gone and now tourism and the business generated by looking after Burmese refugees are the only games in town.
One of the 1,200 bends along the Highway of Death
How I looked after my last Highway trip! My host was a genial Dutchman called Ton, who teaches at an economic development school in the camp and who has dedicated the last 15 years to this work in various camps up and down the border. Hats off to you, Ton! He is a movie buff too and within a couple of days, the Nu Po Roxie was up and running. Nu Po is very close to the Myanmar border and is set in beautiful mountain surroundings. Although only established five or six years ago, it has over 15,000 residents and they make up a diverse community indeed. Since it is just opposite Karen state, most of the residents are Karen, but there are also Kachin, Shan, Burman and many moslems. The moslems are the merchants and the teahouse operators. Curiously, many camp residents did not need to flee for their lives, they came for the free educational opportunities or to try to be resettled in third countries. However, many others have harrowing tales to tell. One of my students had to flee Kachin state when his brother became a ‘person of interest’ because of his political activity. Another, older gentleman , a Burman, clearly had been an intellectual or a functionary of some kind and had to flee five years ago, leaving all behind him. These two were my most enth
Market day inside the camp
Sifting crushed clay to get the fine powder On planning the stove training I decided to make insulative clay bricks for the combustion chambers and use square cooking oil tins as the containers. Luckily, there already existed demonstration videos on Youtube and I was able to project them for the participants to study. They say that a picture is worth a thousand words. I wonder what the calculation is for a moving picture? Although I had studied the videos carefully myself, I had never actually built any of these stoves or indeed fired any bricks. In the videos the clay came out of nice neat paper bags, clearly purchased from the neighborhood pottery supply store. I knew that wasn’t going to happen in Nu Po, but I trusted that at least one of the resourceful Karen would have some clay working experience. I was not disappointed. We dug the clay from an existing hole on the school grounds, pounded it into smaller pieces then sifted that through some fine mesh to obtain the clay powder we would need.
The wet bricks will lie in the sun for two days before being put in the kiln For insulative material to mix with the clay we had three available choices, fine hardwood sawdust, rice husks and powdered charcoal. We used all three and experimented with proportions, as the videos were a little vague in that area. We made the brick molds from plywood and lined them with plastic sheets to make removal of the wet bricks easier, (or indeed, even possible!). Our kiln was a 55-gallon oil drum with the lid cut off and our heat source was rice husks. I had chosen two different bricks shapes, one we called the Africa brick and one we called the Lao brick, after the origin of the videos we were watching. So, after making enough bricks for three Africa stoves and two Lao stoves we loaded up the kiln and held an official lighting ceremony. I was anxious that the husks would keep going out, but once well lit, they burned surprisingly consistently, until they hit the mass of clay bricks. We had packed the bricks too densely and there were not enough husks around them to sustain a burn. But after 48 hours, each brick got at least one side well cooked. The students repacked and another 48 hour firing was started. Unfortunately, I had to leave before the second firing was finished and I am waiting to hear news about the results.
Our makeshift kiln was a regular puffin' Billy! While the kiln was in action we were not idle, no siree Bob! I explained the function and benefits of Pot Skirts and the participants brought their own pots for custom fittings.
The older gentleman, mentioned above, took his creation home at lunchtime and came racing back in the afternoon with a pot twice as large, saying that his wife loved it and that she wanted another one for her gas stove. The advantage she saw was that it directed the heat away from her face.
The older gentleman, mentioned above, took his creation home at lunchtime and came racing back in the afternoon with a pot twice as large, saying that his wife loved it and that she wanted another one for her gas stove. The advantage she saw was that it directed the heat away from her face.
Several solar devices and testers were employed to illustrate basic electrical concepts
For the next four days I gave an introductory training in Solar PV. After much classwork and occasional sleepiness, we would emerge into the bright sunlight to demonstrate and test what we had learned with my show-and-tell bag of solar cells, fans and lights. The basic electric concepts of voltage, current, resistance, energy and power are difficult to master for most westerners and doubly so for those who are meeting them for the first time. However, without a decent grasp of these terms, no-one can design or troubleshoot a PV system.
Mr Cowboy checks to see that everything is flowing as it should We also visited three existing PV systems in the camp, which was extremely instructive, as all three suffered from one maladie or another. The batteries in the large system at the camp administrative office had been allowed to boil off most their acid and thus were ruined. The man charged with looking after the system, affectionately nicknamed Mr Cowboy, was not there when it was installed and had never received any maintenance training. What had been a good powerful system, now could only power two lights for 30 minutes before shutting down. Next we visited a private home where there was a panel and two batteries, but no charge controller. Normally, this is a no-no, but having two batteries ensured that there were never enough hours in the day to overcharge them. I recommended that the two batteries be joined together in parallel to equally charge them both. An amusing incident, (for everyone except the victim), happened at this house. Upstairs we met the family, including a chubby infant, and after reviewing the solar system, we descended to the ground floor to partake of some instant coffee. After a few minutes one participant started patting his head with a questioning look on his face as he surveyed the ceiling for the source of the droplets raining down on him. This merely illustrates the ancient Karen proverb that goes “People who live in bamboo houses must always be ready for the occasional golden shower”. The last site visit was a shop where the panel was facing almost due North, and of course, contributing very little to the health and welfare of the batteries. We sorted that out and soon were on our way home, having learned much and help a little bit too.
Family selling cabbages at the market At the risk of boring the non-battery afficiandos in the audience, I would like to explain about how many of the camp residents get their electricity. There are several small hydro turbines and motor generators that put out occasionally wildly erratic voltages. These are used to charge old car batteries that are then connected to Burmese made-inverters to deliver a loose approximation of 220V for TVs and lights. The short life and poor performance of these batteries are due to several perfect-storm circumstances that not even the most valiant electro-chemical device could withstand. Here’s the sad tale: the batteries are only pressed into domestic service after they will no longer start cars, if they get water, it will be muddy stream water or rainwater, (rarely the mandatory distilled water), they will be discharged to within an inch of their lives on a daily basis and recharged by people who have only the vaguest idea about battery maintenance and no financial incentive to learn more. Oh, and did I mention that car batteries will inevitably have a short and unhappy life if used in deep cycle applications? I had hopes of being able to improve the situation, but when one man asked me why he should take his battery back to the recharger before every last watthour had been squeezed out of it, I couldn’t come up with a reason that made financial sense to him. Why take your pail to the dairy with some milk still in it? They’ll only charge you for your own milk! My entreaties about long term investments fell on deaf ears, as well they might for people who are grateful to still be alive and out of prison. ‘Nuff said about batteries.
We tried to hurry along the sun drying with a little turbo charge from the parabolic cooker! As the bricks gently cooked, we also installed a new solar system on the library building. I had intended to just purchase a small 12V system, as much for a teaching aid as anything else. But my purchase choices were limited and we ended up with a slightly larger 24V system, that will actually supply much of the electricity needed, much of the year. After 3 days of lectures and demonstrations, the students were ready for some hands-on work. Either I’m getting much better at this, or these participants were really bright, (a combination of the two I’m guessing), but the install went very smoothly with only discreet oversight and the occasional suggestion from myself.
The new 185 Watt panel on the Library building With only two days left, the bricks were still not baked, so I started a new rocket stove design featuring a sheet metal combustion chamber. This was done to illustrate the use of another material and the example built by our Kachin participant was an object of beauty. This galvanized metal will only last a month or two, but I did bring some thicker stainless steel that they can use for the real thing later on.
Serious looking graduates from the solar class So ended a very successful and satisfying two weeks. All the participants were extremely grateful for the knowledge and skills imparted, including the megabytes of pdf documents on every subject from gasifiers to greenhouses. Solar Roots left behind a nascent collection of tools for stove building including an angle grinder and cordless drill and I hope some positive feelings about technology transfer and East-West cooperation.
RSS Feed