The first assignment of the newly funded company Kumudzi Kuwale, with whom I will work the following year, was the installation of solar standalone systems at four schools in the Chinteche region in Malawi, just a two-hour drive north of where I will be situated in Nkhotakota.
The installation of the systems was carried out in early December last year by Thomas (the manager before I take over), Geoffrey (the head electrical engineer) and a few students from the vocationals skills training center at Nkhotakota. It seems that the installation was successful, although there were some minor start-up difficulties. The team visited the sites again just before Christmas because they appearantly did not work, only finding out that the reason was that the lights had not been shut off during daytime so the batteries never got the chance to charge.
We now visited the Chimbere school to upgrade the electrical installations and replace the batteries. This school had had solar also before we came in December, but the installation was old, the wiring bad and we found some of the batteries to be more than ten years old, one of them completely broken with an exploded container (due to overcharging? I'll probably learn more about why and how batteries break down soon).
It was very interesting to see the installations that Kumudzi Kuwale had done, and I was pleased to see that our engineer, Geoffrey, and the student we brought with us, Luxson, showed excellent skills and good working morals during the day we spent there. It was also nice to see the teachers and all the kids who benefit from the installations, not to speak of the school buildings which the Norwegian Grønn-Hagen Bjørke Malawi Foundation has constructed for the people in Chinteche.
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