Shortsightedness

Today we visited another fishing community. This one is not on the grid so we are most interested about putting solar panels here. This town is called Malembo and Lydia is going to write a post about it but I will write a short note about a parable that Junior told us.

When we visited Malembo we went to a phone charging station run by one man, Alex Mukiga, who was running a number of shops simultaneously. He had been working there for 1 year and actually used to live in Lwemodde where we work now. He told us that it took him only 9 months to take a new battery to completely useless with all the charging and discharging. Every 4 days he has to do go to Kalisizo (1 hour of Bodda/motorcycle riding) to get to his battery charged. Over the four days he charges 15-20 phones and provides lighting to 4 shops from 7 pm to 11 pm. His battery is a 50 AH battery.

It was obvious why his battery only lasted 9 months. It is a car battery, not a deep-cycle battery. He bought this new for 165,000 shillings which is roughly, $66 USD. I reminded Junior about the talk we had on deep-cycle batteries and how a car battery is not designed for full charge and discharge. It has thin lead plates designed for giving large bursts of current. The deep-cycle has thinker lead plates and some other minor differences which make them very good at going through phases of full charge and discharge. That 165,000 shillings should have been invested in a deep-cycle battery.

Junior's answer to this was very simple. "Here in Uganda,"  as he typically says, "people don't look too deeply into things." He went on to explain that because car batteries would have been used in the dawn of mobile power sources and are known for powering 12 V systems it is very unlikely that people would get something that looks different. A deep-cycle looks very similar to a car battery but they are usually sealed which means you don't see the very distinctive cell valves which you do on vehicle batteries. Junior said that people would see a deep-cycle in a shop, not know that it was better and then get a vehicle battery because it is what they have always been using. 

This makes complete sense. This is why we put a chapter in the manual about batteries so that hopefully this simple but valuable knowledge can spread. We are looking into buying some deep-cycles soon because both this new site will need one but Lwemodde also needs one since both its vehicle batteries are pretty dead. In fact, the voltage measuring circuit we built to test the state-of-charge of a battery doesn't show any sign of life since the voltage on the battery is lower than the bottom threshold of the measuring range. Today we measured their battery to be between 8-9 volts.