A Return to Productivity

I don´t want to give the impression that I´ve spent the last month lounging around in front of a tv, but I finally feel like I am once again being productive. My first three weeks in Nicaragua seem to have been filled with nothing more than finding excuses to force myself into becoming familiar with both the projects of the NGO I´m working with, as well as the way of life and day to day happenings of Malacatoya, the village in which I spent at least half of my time. This past week, however (week 4 of 9), I have actually started to collect data for the turbine assessment I have been assigned.

My first step in this project was to become familiar with how it all operates. Malacatoya is a village of over 100 houses, but 30 of these houses have recently been supplemented with electricity from a microhydro turbine that´s more or less in the middle of town. I say more or less, and use the term town in the loosest sense possible, because these thirty houses I´ve been getting familiar with are connected by nothing more than a network of steep and muddy mountain trails. Needless to say, I´ve quickly become accustomed to my new rubber boots being an acceptable substitute for which a high-tech americanized hiking boot would normally be a requisite. After three weeks of wandering and socializing, my first real act as an Engineer was to start my census by making a map of the houses with electricity. This was done, oddly enough, by doing what I had already been doing for the last few weeks (wandering and socializing), but this time I had a GPS in tow to mark the connected houses as waypoints.

After a having the full picture of how the houses were distributed on the network, it was time to get to know the turbine. To do this, I needed a voltmeter, a clock, a good book, a hammock, and an Ipod with solid headphones to block out the incessant whirring of a water jet being converted into electricty.

*Technical description, skip if needed*
The electricity is produced by a three phase generator which is connected via belt drive to a paddle wheel driven by the water jet. A three phase generator is a much simpler and cheaper design than other motors by altering the output current into three identical loads (or phases). The requirement with this, however, is that these three outputs need to go to equal loads (or demands). Enter me and my responsibilities. While watching the turbine for 24 hours straight, I took notes on the three outputs (the turbine house is in the middle of town with three lines branching out in different directions to 10 houses each, 30 total). Because of the controlling mechanism connected to the generator, the electrical output corresponds to the demand of the network of houses. Therefore, by watching the output I get an idea of the demand and whether or not the three lines are balanced unevenly (a invariable unbalance will break the generator).
*End of technical description, tune back in*

The 24 hours actually passed surprisingly quickly. I used a hammock that I bought at a market in Nicaragua for $8, a sleeping bag (a cotton sheet pretty much) I found for free at some point in college, a book I got as a Christmas Present (Going Postal by Terry Pratchett, very entertaining) and my Ipod to pass the time. Maybe it was the noise, maybe the novelty of the experience ("camping" in a rainforest), or maybe the bugs, but I really only slept for a few hours that night and was fine the next day.

The next step of my investigation is currently halfway done. I am going from house to house to see what appliances (tv´s, radios, dvd players, fridges, lights, and fans are all common) exist and how often they are used. While its interesting enough to see what the village has opted to use their new found electricity for, my favorite discovery is the predominant intimacy of the community. Many times in my first pass at surveying the houses and their appliances I would see the same people in several different houses through out the day. This happened so often, in fact, that I really couldn´t tell who belonged to which house by the time I was done.

All of this said and done, I really only have one more week of work to do in Malacatoya. I have ten more houses to survey, a few odds and ends to measure, one more day watching the turbine spinning round and round, and a forced failure of the turbine to monitor(telling the entire community to turn all of their apliances on at the same time and watching how the system responds). Whats next has yet to be seen. I have five weeks left and only a few simple tasks to do. I think now is when the real explorations start and I find out what the rest of Nicaragua is really about!