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.