Rome wasn't built in a day, it was built in 4 days!

Today (Friday) we signed the first clients and connected them to our grid.

Alex and this customer signs the first contract ever for the Malembo Micro Grid. She wanted a light in her shop which is across the road from our power house.

Our second client.

Signed contracts!

We ran many wires throughout the day and tried to make them as neat as possible. This usually involved putting them close to house beams under the roof hanging past the building. Each client need their own positive wire because they have a specific fuse on their line but the grounds/return can connect in any way which is convenient. If a client is connected and they already have our wires running past their shop then we attach them to the same negative wire. Considering this means that return current will then build up we have capped a single ground line at 6 lights for now. This was relatively arbitrary but should be well under any sort of maximum current that the wire can hold.

Junior unravels the first reel of wire.

Junior passing wire through roof beams.

Wire going into this clothes shop.

Bulb in place.

Spliced in the switch.

Let there be light!

Ground wire spliced into another ground wire.

Another shop which should be happier tonight.

To create the client contract we discussed the deals that people could sign up for in the days leading up to now. The group decided that 300 shillings ($0.12 USD) per light per day was fair. The wires, sockets, lights and switches are free for people but they will need to pay a 3000 shilling ($1.20 USD) installation fee. The contract was translated using Julie and this made it very easy for people to understand everything. Apart from that Alex does a great job of explain the package to new customers.  The contract in both English and Luganda can be found here.

Some of the clients were challenging to get to; specifically the ones across the street. Putting wires underground would be very difficult because the earth is quite hard and we do not have any easily acquired piping. Our solution was simply to use a pole like any real electricity company. The highest point on our building is the top of this ledge on the roof so we put a nail on the top of that and used that to pivot wire over to another roof where we nailed a pole in the side. This is essentially our first ever power line.

One the left is our roof top and on the right is a client's house.

You may be thinking this is a rough set up. I guarantee that I have seen other real grid lines set up by actual electricians here which look much less legit.

There has been talk of using small step up and step down voltage converters for long distance wires to other parts of Malembo. If we did this we would step up the voltage to 48 V and send then step back down to 12 V in different areas. Doing this we would actually require serious power line poles which I would demand are put in the ground with concrete. We would also need to put small isolators on the poles to hold the wires and potentially even a grounded lightning wire on the top. All of this would be a nice project if we return to see how everything is doing or potentially a second project in another bigger village that the group works on.

On Monday we should be finalizing this grid. Making the wires in the station neater and connecting as many people as possible. As part of the ultimate goal for sustainable development Lydia and I will only give new ideas rather than actually do the building. I am happy with the rate at which Alex and the group members are learning the slithers of electrical engineering necessary to have this grid run safely and with quality. The weekend has just passed and I heard that Alex connected someone one his own which sounds like a great start to this business.