Last post from Puerto Penasco

Tomorrow, Fraser and I are leaving our lovely little R&D center here just as this town starts to come alive again. It's spring break so in the past 2 weeks we've seen more tourists and revelers than we have in the past 4 months!  The days are longer, the air is warm and the mood PP, a very tourism reliant town, is on the rise. 

Last week we donated the Phaeton to the local Instituto Tecnológico Superior de Puerto Peñasco. They have an industrial design program and the professor in charge, Rodrigo, is very excited about the opportunity for students to apply their skills to a real world project with social and environmental benefits. The institute sent a truck and some guys to pick the machine up and then we set up the machine together and I ran a little workshop on how to care for the machine, establish a tight focal point, and make new mirror modules. We're going to be in touch and I'll act as a sort of advisor to any students who take an interest. A few already have. While we were setting up the array quite a few students passed by to gawk at the pot of boiling water and the flaming stick. We sure are glad to see the array going to a good cause!




While we'll be sorry to leave, we have a lot to look forward to. We're taking the scenic route home, and by that I mean we'll be driving up the West Coast to Vancouver where we'll spend a few days and then across Canada, visiting relatives along the way! I'll get to see the town where my grandad grew up, and I'll finally meet a lot of family that I haven't yet had the pleasure of getting to know. We're going to take around 3 weeks to drive back and then we're going to build another Phaeton, this one for demonstrations, and then start hitting up international aid, international development and various philanthropic orgs to mount a project.  


I'll update mid trip with pics of our journey! 

Results! A convenient, inexpensive, high-power solar cooker

Now, I know some of you are saying "But Lorin, didn't you already have a convenient, inexpensive, high-power solar cooker?" And the answer is yes, but this is the convenientest, inexpensivest, high-poweredest yet! Well, not high poweredest, fine, but still. This is a really important development for solar cooking internationally.

This is what it’s all about right here: we’ve finished the core of our new solar cooking system.

I contend that this is one of the simplest, most convenient and most cost effective high power (2kwh) solar cooking solutions.

I’ll go into technical and performance details in a later post but for now just check out the ergonomics and consider the facility of use. Waist high cooking console with a lever to control the mirrors and a ‘rearview mirror’ to peek at the underside of the pot to ensure that the machine is properly oriented. The cooking console is far enough removed from the mirrors that putting up a shade or umbrella will not affect the system. All while harnessing 2kwh of solar thermal energy. Enough to boil 8L of water in 40 minutes.

It’s a simplified version of our old mainstay, the Helios array that we’re calling the Phaeton coupled with something we’ve managed to develop that we’re calling an upward reflector. Thin mirror strips reflect the light upwards and onto the bottom of a cooking vessel, enabling boiling or frying in a traditional manner.

There’s a reason we call these technologies Solar Fire. No new recipes required… the Phaeton will cook anything a fire cooked and more.

The convenience factor matched with the power of the machine and leveraged using the upward reflector means that this is a significant development which helps to overcome a persistent flaw in many solar cookers of this size. Observe the following pictures of larger solar cookers which are in more or less the same size league as ours.

The bigger they get, the less accessible the focal point becomes at certain times of day, or the more extreme the angle of incoming light which hinders some processes like frying. Waist high solar cookers like the Devos cooker at the very right have difficulty exceeding 2 square meters of collector area. Tinytech on the far left has an inexpensive, solid 3 square meter cooker, but the geometry does not favour frying, one cannot install a shade, accessing the pot means shading the reflector, and it cannot operate as early or late. The Phaeton can operate from an hour after sunup to an hour before sunset. In the clear skied tropics you get 8 good hours of solar cooking per day. I have yet to make a big test batch of rice but based on some rough figuring the Phaeton can prepare at least 50kg of rice per day. Instead of rice we’ve been making marmalade and dried pineapples 

Oh, and it costs less than $500 to build.

Designed to be built onsite by local tradespeople the Helios array uses common materials that are off the shelf in nearly every country on the globe.

My grandfather and I want to engage in international aid projects wherever the need is greatest. Aid organizations running camps in Haiti could see these machines work 8hrs a day and pay themselves off in less than a year, reducing fuel budgets and improving health standards by sterilization and improved air quality. Sub-Saharan countries ravaged by deforestation and suffering under the weight of energy poverty can use this free technology to start generating wealth at all levels of society.

Seriously, we’re mounting a project, somewhere, somehow, and we’d love your help.

Solar food dehydrator

If you recall the solar drier prototype from a few posts ago you'll recognize it here, though now paired with our new Helios array.

The Vesta was underpowered so we decided to hook it up with a 35 sq. ft Helios array. 

Fraser administers the 'smoke test' where we place a burning stick at the air intake and count out how long it takes for it to escape through the chimney, giving us a rough idea of airflow. We're running at about 45 cubic feet per minute at a max of 150F. This is OK performance but we've still got some tinkering around to optimize the system. 

This is a test batch of about 10lbs of nixtamalized corn, AKA hominy. Still 

a couple hours of drying time left to go but we're hoping to have a fully 

dried product in a single day of drying. 

By midweek we should be done building 'la piece de resistance', a waist height cooking console with multiple configurations for boiling, frying, baking and roasting! 

Working Hardly

Apparently when it comes to blogging I can take it or leave it. For a while, anyhow. It has been too long since my last post and so I am here to remind you all that we're still working and making good progress. It may not be the kind of progress we originally intended, but progress isn't progress without.. ... progress.

Orange marmalade abounds! We're eating our test batches at the rate of about a liter a week because the stuff is just so good! I'll post the recipe once I can coax it out of grandad. We've made more hibiscus flower jelly (in Mexico hibiscus flowers are called 'flor de Jamaica'. And we made an apple / hibiscus fusion that is very, very fine!

Surely we can't have been making jellies and marmalades all this time, so what have we been up to? Well I took a couple of weeks vacation, enjoying a visit by my friend Aysa from Toronto, I was bedridden for a week by my bad back which took an inexplicable turn for the agonizing, I took it easy for another week just working afternoons and we've taken a total tangent, getting away from the Vesta array and starting in on a new vision for the Helios array including finally solving the problem of the cursed upwards reflector!

So we shifted gears from product development back to where my heart dwells, in technological research and development. booya!

Next post will describe the new Helios, it's advantages as well as our quest to reflect. upwards.

Product development

We've been wrestling with this solar drier for a couple of weeks now and thought it was time to switch things up a little bit. Yesterday being new years day, we weren't in the mood for anything too heavy so we decided to make some jelly.

Until now we had refrained for lack of suitable jars, but we found some decent glass jars that will serve us during the product development phase. I've also placed an order in Mexico's industrial heartland for 500 jars and hot seal tops which will serve us once we've got our recipes. It's a good thing I like toast!

First up: Tamarind jelly.

Here Fraser can be seen testing the jelly to see if it is ready to 'set'. We ended up with just over a liter of delicious, powerful jelly. We're going to try to get our jars into some local stores but regardless we're both going to start eating a lot of toast... :)

Solar Drier Prototype

Fraser and I have just completed our Vesta powered food drier Mark I. In the past two weeks we have built an additional Vesta and we have done a considerable amount of tinsmithing, the results of which can be seen here:

The whole contraption pivots around the central post of the Vesta, which is more or less of the same design as the previous model. The drier sits atop a chassis which is joined to the central post by a hinged boom made of heavy angle iron. The two bicycle wheels are angled such that their axles point directly at the post.

Those bicycle wheels. At first we looked in the hardware stores for new wheels, but all the hard rubber wheels of the diameter that we wanted were built for huge loads and were more expensive than need be. Fraser quite rightly said that we could find a child's bike for cheap and have a smoother ride. I added 'small child's bike' to the list of things to keep my eyes open for as we ran our various errands.

Soon thereafter we came across a second hand store, the likes of which you'll see every few blocks in most lower income residential neighbourhoods here in Puerto Penasco. On the sidewalk (or what may pass for a sidewalk) in front of someone's house, there are racks of clothing, toys, kitchenware, exercise machines and a wide variety of bits and bobs. It's essentially a permanent garage sale. Neighbours get rid of their unwanted stuff conveniently and she who sells stuff waits for another neighbour to need the object in question.

In the slew of stuff for sale I spied a bike of the size we were looking for. In the right condition too. Not too old, but old enough to be cheap. We pull up, get out and I ask the woman how much for the bike.
"Oh, no, I couldn't sell it, it belongs to my son." she says.
Toying with the idea that this could be a gringo upsell tactic I reply "Really? That's a shame we've been looking all over for one that size... it's just right."
She considers. "Well, let's ask him. MANUEL!!" she calls out to the house. A little boy comes cruising out of the courtyard on a bigger, nicer bike with the chain rusted and hanging loose. "Want to sell your little bike?"
"No!" he shouts, dismounts his bigger bike, runs to the smaller one and zooms off. His mother and I look at eachother and smile. "How does 100 pesos sound?" An eyebrow raises. Too high. "About right" she replies.

Manuel comes zooming back and his mother tells him this bike is too small for him anyway and that with the money he can fix the chain on his big bike. "And have enough left over for candy" I chip in.
"500 pesos!" he exclaims, his eyes big, licking his lips. We laugh. His mom tells me to hand him the money (100 pesos!) and he immediately runs off to show his friends. Later that day I did this to his bike:

I'm working on a more thorough montage for the construction of this latest Vesta as well as some of the construction of the drier.

Over the course of this latest building phase we've vacillated between thinking of ourselves as very clever and utter fools. We're quite happy with the result so far but there is still doubt as to whether or not it will work as it did when grandad built it in his head. I'm of the opinion that it won't, and will need forced air to work properly. Grandad is coming around to this perspective in his way.

http://solardevicesforthirdworld.webs.com/

It has been cloudy for the past few days and so we've been working on a back up plan. Our idea of using steel screen as a heat exchanger at the focal point took Fraser's fancy and he thought that the same principle could be applied to the more conventional solar drier which looks something like this ----------------->

So we've built a test collector roughly the same shape as the glass portion of the collector to the right, only 1 foot deep with 14 layers of steel screen to absorb the sunlight.
While I am sure that it will perform better than a flat black sheet metal collector, I think that it is overkill. The central idea being porosity means more surface area which means more contact with air which means more effective transfer of heat. No doubt it will work better, but expense and difficulty of construction have drained my enthusiasm. Nevertheless, out curiosity is piqued and we will construct two other collectors of the same size: one of the flat black sheet metal and another, somewhere on the spectrum between sheet metal and screen.

I think that, while interesting, the experiments will come to nothing much of value because in my experience and research I've found that passive drying does not provide the level of control, heat or airflow that a more 'active' drier does and so cannot produce the same quality of product. We shall see.

Busy little bees

Onward and upward! Fraser and I continue to plug away at our list of tasks... we're very nearly finished our fruit and veggie dehydrating unit and a second Vesta. Once finished they will allow us to really get into some serious gathering of data and experimentation, which we await with great anticipation.

We are going to nixtamalize corn and dry it, we'll dry bananas, onions, pineapple and mangos, we're going to make tamarind jelly, hibiscus jelly and orange marmalade and if we're feeling ambitious we'll roast peanuts with chili and garlic.

Vesta Solar Cooker assembly

We've successfully built and tested the first of several Vestas we're going to make. We got excellent results based on our first tests but are going to gather more data and provide some sexy graphs to really make the point. Construction vids to follow, cooking vids to follow and a cost breakdown too. The machine costs less than $200 and I can build one in three days.

New Home = Sweet Home.

Welcome to Symington Solar Fire Mexican Headquarters! Fraser and I have settled in to our new digs and are keen to get moving.

'Who knew that a couple of peasants could aspire to such comfort?' Fraser asks and only half in jest. Truly, we have been fortunate. After arriving in Puerto Penasco a week ago we again sought accommodations at the Dreamweaver Inn. Oscar, who is the general manager there and the man who we would see be our business partern smiled broadly upon seeing us again and asked 'Couldn't stay away, could you?' We replied that we 'Could have, but we thought better of it, in no small part because of you!' he was both pleased an puzzled. Over the course of the next couple of days we laid out our plan to him and his wife Lupita.

The plan we laid out to him was in essence: 1) Grandad and I secure a house with a suitable yard and a space to fabricate a couple of arrays. 2) We build 3 Vestas, a couple of drying units, an oven and a roaster for nuts and other roastables. 3) We begin experimenting with various fruits and vegetables and eventually settle on a couple of what we think are the best and most marketable. 4) We establish communications with wholesalers and independent health food stores and attempt to establish a flow of goods. 

Oscar said he was able and willing to work with us on a part time basis to learn how we make machines and to lend insights as we develop products. We only have a certain amount of time, however, given that our auto insurance and visas run out mid March. Bringing Oscar into the fold serves the double purpose of having a manager who will be able to continue operations/production in our absence and, in the event that we don't manage to establish a flow of goods, having a local entrepreneur attempt to make a go of using Solar Fire technologies independently.

Oscar is a clever and curious fellow and the suggested action plan involves no risk on his part, so we were not surprised that he was enthusiastically game. That being the case, Fraser and I spent the rest of the week cruising around looking for a suitable place. Eventually, the good people at Twin Dolphin Realty brought us to see the mansion you see here. The sun access in the yard is not ideal, but it is acceptable, there is a garage, it is fully furnished (down to the details... as if people had up and left a month ago) and let me tell you, the price is right!

Real estate here has tanked in the last couple of years. Bob from Twin Dolphin says that the boom that Puerto Penasco experienced from 2004 - 2007 was somewhat artificial and speculative in nature and with the meltdown in the US that since then things have gone from bad to worse. This is evidenced by our getting a place like this for half of what it is worth. We're on a monthly rental, but depending on how things go we might just hang on to the place.

Once we had a place lined up we continued to scout for materials and everything is lined up so that monday we buy metal and glass! By next weekend we should have a preliminary Vesta up and running and another 2 or 3 will not be far behind.

Workshop:

Guaymas / San Carlos

    

This is Guaymas!

Pretty ain't it? Can you blame me for having spent two weeks here without have blogged much? 

The fact of the matter is that there hasn't been much to blog about. We did some productive reconnaissance though. We went a hundred or so clicks south to Ciudad Obregon which I had determined, after checking out  Google Earth satellite imagery, was the closest hotbed of agricultural activity. A day's reconnaissance there and we discovered the biggest fruit and vegetable wholesaler in town. If we ever develop the capacity to dry or otherwise process fruits and veggies, we'll be well set.

'Well what's taking so long?' you might well ask. And so you should. Over the course of exploring the city and  checking out Obregon I expressed to my grandad, Fraser, that I thought it was unlikely that we would be able to leave a profitable, functioning business here by the time our vehicle insurance etc. runs out in mid-March. This caused a certain amount of light consternation and so to settle the matter Fraser suggested that we sit down and story board it. We did. He asked me to lay out my supposed time frame.

It went something like this: 1 month to get settled (house and workshop) and build 2 Vestas one for simple boiling and frying and one especially built for a food dryer. This gives us the ability to experiment and develop products. I used his example of hominy. 

For those unfamiliar, hominy, or here in Mexico, nixtamal results from processing corn in a certain way. You boil the corn for a couple of hours in an alkaline solution which causes the outside layer called the bran to peel away. A little more boiling and the kernel of corn flowers and has been nixtamalized. You then wash the corn and rinse off the alkaline solution and are left with a vastly more nutritious and flavourful kernel. If you're going to use it fresh, that's fine, but if you're planning on shipping it to the states you either have to can it or dry it. We're opting for drying because we've got energy to spare and canning detracts taste and nutrients.

So I took his example of hominy and I said that since the net gives us widely varying estimates on how long to boil hominy, we'd have to run separate batches through at increasing durations, i.e. 1hr30m, 1hr45min, 2hr, 2:15 and so on. Then there's how long to dry them. How dry do they need to get? What about alkalinity levels? How long to soak before hand? After? All these variables will have to be investigated if we are to develop a quality product. I said minimum 2 weeks. To simplify I then said 2 weeks for each new product developed. Not only that, but then we have to settle on a recipe, cook up 5 batches in a row and then set them in their sealed packages in various conditions of heat / light to see how long they take to spoil. I don't want to put a stab-in-the-dark best before date on our products. That could lose us customers down the line.

Then there's import/export complications, a business license, whatever other red tape might trip us up etc. Once we have products, building more solar arrays to boost production capacities and we haven't even approached the wholesalers yet! I concluded that we would be well on our way if before we leave we have 3 or 4 finished products which we could take with us up to the states and Canada and with which we could attempt to interest health food stores and wholesalers. 

I notice I used 'I' a lot there but it was, for the most part, a collaborative process. 

In any event, conversation turned to how the business would function in our absence, Fraser determined that we had to have a managing partner we could trust and that our main man Oscar from the Dreamweaver is the man for the job and that we should, since we already paid for 2 weeks accommodation here, take our time and enjoy ourselves. For the record I argued that Puerto Penasco has roughly 10% less sun, is further from agricultural production and that as much as I like Oscar, we'd likely find someone comparable in Guaymas. 

So we've spent the past two weeks reading abundantly, playing lots of cribbage ( i just today broke out of a 5 game losing streak bringing the record to 15-11 for good old grandad, though that's not what I call him when he's getting 2 fives in every crib...) and spending plenty of time at the beach. :)

Puerto Penasco

Arriving in PP we quickly set about exploring the town, countryside, beaches and a local bar or two. We found that in many ways it met our expectations. Bath-warm water at white sand beaches, plenty of tourists, at least a couple of RV parks, what seemed to be communities made up entirely of American and Canadian retirees, and a thriving marina and fish market.

We arrived on Friday just after lunch and by dinner had made friends with a couple of friendly Arizonans who gave us the lowdown on what`s where and when`s what. October is one of the slowest months as the summer tourists are gone and those who will stay the winter have generally not arrived and are not likely to arrive until after American Thanksgiving or even until after Christmas (these assertions were later verified by various peddlers, hustlers, innocent bystanders and our inn-keep Oscar). Not only that, said they, but the recession has hit rather hard and for the past three years, nowhere close to as many people had been spending the winter as in years previous.

We had, in our explorations, come to remark that there were an awful lot of for sale, for rent and under construction (I use that term loosely, as it looked as if many had not been worked on for some time) properties. We began to doubt.

By Sunday afternoon I had us sorted out with regards to a shop where we would be able to build a couple or three Vestas, a steel supplier, a list of possible rental houses in the neighborhood, groceries and fine accommodations for a week at the Dreamweaver.

That done, we continued to explore the city and the environs, but in doing so remarked to ourselves that it had been at best mostly sunny, but that by 2 in the afternoon the sky would go to haze and even in the morning would not regularly exceed 80% clearness. This, in addition to the lackluster economy had us thinking about exploring further down the coast. Grandad told me that Puerto Penasco had not been his first choice, but that being so close to the border, it seemed a logical one if we were to decide to run any kind of solar dried produce exporting business. He told me about a town roughly 5 hours south that is considered a gem by the sizable ex-pat community that inhabits it. Fraser bade me do a comparison of the available solar data, and using a handy dandy NASA database of more information than I know what to do with I was able to determine that Guaymas is in fact at least 10% sunnier than Puerto Penasco. Further research indicated that Guaymas is closer to productive agricultural regions and that by comparison, Puerto Penasco is something of a party town filled with rowdy teenagers.

That settled it. We would venture to explore Guaymas before planting firm roots in Puerto Penasco. Buuuut.... seeing as we`d paid for a weeks accommodations in advance, we figured we had earned a bit of a break and so have been reclining, reading, drinking Bacardi Anejo, playing cribbage and going to the beach.

We go to Guaymas tomorrow.

The Trip

In six and a half days Fraser and I made our way 4400km to the beautiful, if down with the times, seaside town of Puerto Penasco. We didn`t touch the radio hardly at all and entertained ourselves by playing guessing games and observing the countryside by day and with cribbage by night.

The trip was uneventful and for the most part without adventure, the most exciting deviation being to explore a large wind farm we passed through on the way down.

Near Clinton, Oklahoma at the Blue Canyon Wind Farm, one of the largest wind farms in the US. That wind turbine is 220 feet tall with 115 ft. blades generating 1.65MW!

A refresher on Solar Fire etc.

Visit http://bit.ly/cf1ozx for a quick read about the technologies, the vision and to see some pics of the tech.

Symington Solar

A new chapter in my solar saga is beginning! The originator of the Solar Fire technologies, my grandfather Fraser Symington, has asked that I accompany him to Mexico for the winter so that we might a) escape the Canadian cold (he is 90 years old, after all) and b) establish if/how someone can turn a profit using his Symington Solar Arrays.

The case being thus, my first priority is keeping granddad safe and well and second is to facilitate whatever it is he decides to do. He has been tinkering with and developing the technology for close to 20 years but this is the first time he has been free to really pursue a long term initiative where utilization of the tech would be the central focus.

As evidenced by previous blog posts, essays and websites, I had gone a slightly different direction with the technology than my grandfather advises; he says “Make money with it and the technology will spread automatically.” Fair’s fair and I’m now willing to give his way a shot. Based on our discussions preceding our trip I would most likely do things differently than he plans to, but I really want to see his ideas tested, his theories proved or disproved and I want him to have the satisfaction of seeing his invention fly according to his designs. That being the case I plan to merely act as an extension of his will though I’ll certainly play devil’s advocate when the inclination arises.

Fraser’s plan is to head to Mexico. Reasoning: a) close enough to Canada that should medical problems arise, we’re not pooched, b) we can drive there and so bring down prefab pieces, tools and more gear than we would otherwise be able to c) I speak the language, d) American $. Though we are not married to any idea in particular, we have set our sights on Puerto Peñasco, a town 60 miles from the US Arizona border that is sometimes called “Arizona’s Beach” due to it being the closest seaside to Phoenix and Tuscon.

PP lies near the apex of the Sea of Cortes which is a deep bay formed by the Baja Peninsula. The waters are warm, the tourists and American retirees are numerous and we figure we just might be able to make a buck there.

Off we go in our little Kia Spectra, full to the brim!

Back in the saddle, such as it is.

Well, it has been more than a year since my last post so I might as well let you know that I'm prototyping a new and improved concentrator that has already blown my mind a few times and will hopefully do the same for you once I show it to you.

I'm not going to do that now.

Boo hoo.

Soon, though, as I'm going to be unveiling it with Chocosol at their Solstice Chocolatada on June 21.

Normality? Where?

And by "normality" I clearly meant blogging getting pushed off the agenda by tasks innumerable.

Things are advancing on the MFC contract: we just finished painting the last of the mirrors for the Helios for MFC. Monday we should go out and buy the materials for the dehydrator and the boiler, and hopefully we will finish them within the week. After work we'll be working (heh) at Djadjé's on a new and improved oven.

That should give us about 1 week for tests and modifications, because after that I am going home.

That's right, you heard me, Ottawa, Canada.

MFC has a project at Timbuktu and I'm welcome and encouraged to work on it because there is money, as well as R&D and pilot project possibilities, but it is not the right time for that. I'm in debt to the point where it is unwise to continue abroad. And as such, I think it is prudent to go home, recuperate financially and physically while consolidating and improving the online presence of the project and plan the next move.

For instance, I’ll have to revise this blog, because it’s called ‘The Solar Fire Project Blog’ but it has so far only served as a blog for me and the Mali mission, while I’ve regrettably neglected blogging about what has being going on with Feu Solaire in France. They’ve been doing great things, so check out the website at www.solarfire.org for the latest info.

Leaving Mali will give me a good chance to test the association that we’ve put up here. We’re working on a deal that would see donors in Canada and the United States provide enough funds for the construction and installation of 3 Helios concentrators with ovens, which Tile Tasuma would provide to interested groups under a micro-loan arrangement where the cost of the machines is spread over a period of time where the income generated by using the machine will pay off the loan, and as the money flows back to Tile Tasuma, they will build more concentrators and start the process over again with new partners.

So much to do, so little time, I should be leaving Mali around the 3^rd of June.

To everyone who has supported my throughout this experience: thank you so much. This is by no means the end, merely a pause to regroup and improve.

ANEJ conference and MFC Helios

On the 3^rd of May, the President of Tile Tasuma, Mr. Ibrahim C Tomota, who has been active on the Solar Fire Project since we arrived in Bamako on the 19^th of December, tells me he saw a banner saying that there was a conference of environmental journalists, organized by the Minister of Sanitation and the Environment, Mr. Agatham Ag Alassane, and maybe we should present there. I pointed out that it was Saturday and the conference started on Monday. He said let’s go see the Minister of the Environment and see what can be done. Months before, the Minister said that we were welcome to stop by his home whenever we had news or wanted to discuss. We did so Sunday night. We told him that we had finished the Butterfly, and he said ‘oh great! You’ve got to come to the conference!’ He got on the phone with the organizers and bam, three days of mixing it up with ANEJ (African Network of Environmental Journalists). I have mixed feelings about this conference though, and I might blog them soon. Here is the Minister at the opening ceremony:

And here is the Prime Minister of Mali, clearly pleased with what he hears, he is flanked by the Minister of the Promotion of the Woman, Child and Family and the Minister of Sanitation and the Environment:

The goal of the conference was to raise awareness of the power that journalists have in society to stress the importance of reporting on environmental issues and bring these things to the attention of decision makers and the general public. Did it work? Well the Butterfly was featured as the ‘pic of the week’ in l’Essor the national daily newspaper. You can read the article, hosted here at www.maliweb.net

Soon enough though, it was back to the grind.

Here is Djadjé painting the new Helios:

And us back at Djadjé’s workshop, working to dusk like the good old days.

And me, hating working with sheetmetal:

And Djadjé, stylish as always, welding away:

Excuses, MFC and plans for the summer

A long overdue greetings, everyone!

Things, including me, have been crazy lately. The future is clearer now than it was yesterday, though still not as clear as I would like it to be. Informative, eh?

At least the next month is fairly clear: this morning Tomota and I, as President and Technical Secretary (respectively) of the non-profit association Tile Tasuma (www.tiletasuma.org) signed a contract with the Mali-Folkecenter, an NGO that is very involved in community oriented ecological and renewable energy projects.

Over the next month we will build and test and, if we have time, revise a solar thermal system which will be used to produce Shea butter. The processes we’re interested in are the boiling and the drying of the nuts. I have been provided with very little data about the drying of Shea nuts, as this is the first year MFC is involved in the project, so I have essentially designed a fruit and vegetable dryer, hoping that it won’t be too far off what we need and that we’ll be able to modify it according to what we learn.

We started buying the materials today, will continue tomorrow and then will work like mad to get another Helios concentrator built ASAP which will give us the most time to develop the applications. The idea is to prove the concept of a solar Shea nut process, which would open the door to a longer, more involved project.

I soon have to make the decision if I am staying in Mali for the summer or not. A great number of factors are weighing on the decision but the deciding factor is essentially whether or not I land a paid contract which would span the summer. If I don’t, I’ll set up the association here with funds to continue in my absence, while I go back to Canada to sort myself out financially and personally before returning to Mali sometime in the fall.

Again, sorry for not writing more often sooner, but things have been more trying than I have let on. Normality has been more or less restored, so expect more frequent blogs.

L

Butterfly Expo

March 31^st 2008

Today AMADER (the Malian Agency for Domestic Energy and Rural Electrification), the group who financed the development of the Butterfly so far, had a demonstration for a department of the Ministry for the Promotion of the Woman, Child and Family. The object of the demo was to highlight the link between energy and the family. AMADER asked that I bring the Butterfly and Helios and do some cooking.

Here we are setting up the Helios on the edge of a soccer field. Once the mirrors started going up their curiosity got the better of them and they put the game on hold to come hang out while we set up the machine.

Some of the adults were concerned that the children would burn themselves with the Solar Fire, but teaching the kids some solar safety was easy, even if we didn’t speak the same language. The trick is to get them to put their hand in the focal point, but not at the point of most concentration. They exclaim and withdraw their hand, surprised by the heat. Then you get them to put their hand back in and slowly move towards the point of maximum concentration… they don’t get very close. Then you burn a stick and the message is clear.

Unfortunately we didn’t have time to organize any baking of cake, but gathering the ingredients to make a nice pot of rice wasn’t hard. Note the rolling boil we’ve got going on. That’s about 5L of liquid and 1.5kg of rice, plus some veggies and beef.

The ladies from the ministry were mightily pleased. Two of the biggest advantages they see are time saved gathering wood out in the bush and improved cleanliness. Cooking on a fire leaves the pot all black and sooty, which dirties hands, clothes and dishwater while solar cooking leaves the pot as clean as when you started (except if you burn the rice, which we almost did…)

Now granted I’m a little bit taller than the average Malian woman, but the ergonomics of the machine are still quite acceptable for women here. Traditionally, cooking is done on the ground over a fire, and overcoming cultural inertia is never easy, but a number of the women we’ve talked to have said the equivalent of ‘so what if I can’t cook on the ground if I don’t have to go gathering/buying as much wood?’

Now we’re going to embark upon more expensive testing and fine tuning of the Helios bread oven as well as the Iron Butterfly designs.

Meanwhile, administratively things have stalled a little bit. I had left the association to do its thing while I do tech development but their follow-up on the contacts we’ve made has been less than satisfactory. I’ve put my hand back in the mix and we’ll see how things progress over the next couple of weeks, at which point important decisions will have to be made.

High hopes, as usual.

And in this... field...

Ladies and Gentlemen!

Allow me the pleasure of introducing to you, the (temporarily named) Iron Butterfly!

Weighing in at a hefty 51kg, the Iron Butterfly has a reflective surface of 1.8m², and at an elevation of 370 meters above sea level is capable of boiling 4.5kg of water in 30 minutes while INcoming SOLar radiATION (insolation) averages 701 watts per meter squared. *deep breath* Built with 100% locally materials costing a total of 41,305 francs, roughly equal to 90$ Canadian, the Iron Butterfly will soon be showing off it's culinary capacities, it's cooking qualities and last but not least, it's 178 painstakingly positioned mirrors.

Thank you mister boxing announcer, sir, but to write the rest of the blog in your style would be silly, not to mention hard. How does a boxing announcer present scientific data like

and then explain that windspeed was constant at <2m/s, ambient temperature was 37degC and there was 4.5kg of water in the pot?

Right, so, as you've heard the Butterfly has had it's first test flight since we've come to some sort of stable design. It is a lot of work to build, and is heavier than I would have liked, but it is rock solid and durable.

I'll give a brief rundown of the construction process. You should already be familiar with the mold. Around the mold we have built a jig, which allows us to place the lengths of square tubing in the same place every time.

Upon the mold we place the mirrors, face down. In the center of each of the mirrors we place a square of sheet metal to which we have welded a small iron rebar stub. We then lay the lengths of square tubing on the jig and then weld the stub to the square tubing.

The result is the Iron Butterfly wing, minus the mirrors.

Apply glue to the wing.

Apply the wing to the mirrors.

Apply the wings to the structure, and then apply sunlight to the Butterfly and...

Voila!