Dear friends,Our Indian colleagues left us yesterday evening and went back to Hyderabad, since their exams are coming soon. We used the past week for our experiments with the small stoves, which were meant to be introduced to the villagers around Adoni to conserve firewood. We failed somehow. The advantages of our alternative stoves were not too satisfying compared to the ordinary fire. We used alternative fuels for our steam boiler, more one alternative fuel, wood pellets. The result was satisfying, the pellets burnt but the current design of the boiler doesn’t allow to use the pellets in an efficient way.

The distance between furnace and tank is too large, so the heat is not properly transferred in the boiler. For a proper usage of such a fuel we need to change the boilers design. Since we found out that the lid of the boiler is broken, while heating up steam is not just coming out of the exhaust valve but also out of the lid. This prohibits proper experiments with the system. It is very disappointing to find the system (boiler) in such a weak state, since it was alright last year. The metal used to weld the boiler is not meant to be used for any vessel purpose and especially not for high temperature usage. So this just 3,5 year old system appears to be at least a decade old and is in a worse state. Even our Indian colleagues guessed the boiler to be at least 8 years old, before knowing the real date of implementation. After this examination we decided to exchange the boiler, since a future system won’t last entirely for more than a few years with such a poor boiler, perhaps not even years. We already contacted some steamkitchen supplier in Bangalore since we are also in contact with the solar supplier over there as well as the insulation company.

We think that this concentration of all the supplier in one city might be a stronger foundation for future projects, following the technology of our lighthouse project here in Adoni. Therefore, we will visit Bangalore the next Monday and Tuesday to meet potential supplier and get their offers for our system. We are looking forward to meet the kids next week, since the holidays end today and the will come back to the boarding school all along the weekend. So mid next week will be the great hello again time, when we see our students a bit more grown up after one year. This week we met already some 200 students of a three days“faith formation” course here in Adoni. They were very curious about our work and tasks and followed us in a very interested way. Since we spent also the October 2011 in Adoni they met us already and so some of them remembered us and continued the discussions from the last year. We all are doing well. No major diseases harnessing or poor bodies, suffering in an agreeable temperature range of 25-35 degree Celsius.

26.10.2012 08:45, David Norta