Doi Philu, Thailand

On 11 Dec 2009, Friday, I went to Chiang Mai, stayed at Tawan Court for a night. Collected the solar panels, deep cycle battery and bought tools, wires and C channel aluminum rods for the solar project.

Next day, I went to Pai Village, two and half hour drive north of Chiang Mai. It has 762 curves on the road to Pai. I stayed at Charlie's House at Pai for 3 days. The place looks like Margeret River, Perth, Western Australia. The weather is cool, 12 degrees Celcius in the morning.
Every day, the driver will pick me and drive me to Doi Philu which is one and half hour drive to the mountian top. We install the solar panels, charge controller, batteries and 20 LED lamps.

Unfortunately, the system can turn on for only 30 minutes and it will trip because it detected low voltage. The battery when fully charge is 26 volts and when the lights are on it immediately drop to 24 volts.

Will visit the place again next April 2010 to see what is the problem.

I suspect the charge controller might be giving the problem.

Performance of the 1KW Photovoltaic System at Aoral, Cambodia

I have collected 3 days of voltage samples across the battery bank. It can be seen clearly that during the day, the battery voltage rises due to the sun shining onto the solar panels, thus charging the batteries.

At night, we use the ceiling fans and security lights at the compound. You can see the battery voltage is dropping due to the battery discharging its energy.
The first night we over used the ceiling fans, we turn on all 4 fans. It cause the battery to discharge to much, shutting down the security lighting in the middle of the night because the charge controller senses a low battery voltage. One fan was switched off at about 3am and the battery voltage recovered a bit.
The next 2 days, we were able to manage our electricity better and there was no shutdown of the system. We uses only 3 ceiling fans for the night.

LED Lanterns for Aoral

We have design a low cost LED lantern that can offer lights to the poor at night for their dinner or for the childrent to study. The lantern is charged by solar. A day's charge can provide continous light for 25 hours, which is approximately 5 nights of usage. This means that they only need to charge their lantern once every 5 days.

Installation at a village chief house, the solar panel and charger.

We donated 24 lanterns to the villages.

Next, we install the solar lantern at a school dormitory at Aoral. They do not have lights at night.

The charger is placed at the principal's bedroom and the lanterns are all connected to the charger.

At night, the students are using the lantern to study. Before that, they were using candles.

Security Lights at Kg Speu

On 5 October 2009, we went to Kampung Speu, Cambodia, to install 6 security lamps at a training centre. They have built-in Ni-Cd batteries to provide back-up power when there is black out at night. It has a light sensor and the lamp will automatically turn on when it is dark.

Short Visit to Cambodia

I did a short visit to Aoral, West of Cambodia to repair the inverter on 8 May 2009.

Finally it is replace with a new inverter. The previous inverter broke down due to excessive electrical overload which causes the casing of fuse to melt and make the inverter non operational. Interestingly, the fuse did not blow.

Next, on 9 May, I went to Hope Village at Prey Veng (East of Cambodia) to replace the old lead acid batteries with new deep cycle lead acid batteries. The batteries were getting old and not getting full charge for the solar. The security lights shut down at about 2am in the morning because of the weak batteries.

I returned home on 11 May 2009.

Visit Laos, Vientiane

I visited Vientiane, Laos, on 2 April 2009. Stayed there for 10 days. While we were there, we taught the Lao students Webpage Design and English. It is a nice, quite and clean city.

Above is a group picture taken at the Victory Monument, Patouxay, at Vientiane.

The 2 pictures shows us conducting English lessons and guiding the students on web design project.

We were there during their New Year and everyone were celebrating the water festival willingly!

While in Vientiane, we met old friends who stay at Vientiane, Laos.