Harold Athuman
4 October 2008
column
Arusha — This article presents two cases of solar system installed to two different customers and explains why some installed system work properly and others do not. The presented cases are not hypothetical but findings obtained from the field after inspection and interviewing owners of the system in Northern zone some times last month.
Case I, a customer owns a 12 watts solar panel for the purpose of powering his radio cassette and lighting his house in Orkesumet. He was not advised on appropriate size of the solar equipment, since he had some electrical installation idea he decided to install his system himself after purchasing other equipment including 10 watt Fluorescent light and 100 solar battery from a different supplier.
No charge controller was installed in that system. He has been using his light for an average of 4 hours every day and a radio for six hours each day. He uses six litres of Kerosene every month to supplement the solar system for lighting in other rooms.
He did not get interactions or the maintenance of the system when he bought and installed the system, ever since he has never cleaned a solar module (panel) and he has been topping up his battery with acid because some people owning cars in his area use acid to top up their batteries too.
After sometime the owner of the system started complaining that he was not satisfied with the system lamps (Fluorescent light are dim especially during cloudy climates period. He ascertained that the system was not meeting his power requirement and he was not interested in expanding the system. Surely we need skilled personnel in the villages to maintain solar systems.
In case II, customer bought a 120 watts solar system for powering a radio and lighting in a house at Longido - Monduli district. He bought all the system Component a 120 watts mono - crystalline solar array, 16 Amps charge controller, 200Ah solar battery and lights from a reputable supplier in Arusha who then installed the system. The system owner (customer) declares that he is using a 21 inch television, 2 Fluorescent lights 3 and 10 watts energy saver light, 62 watts radio and a cell phone charger. The customer was well informed on how to handle the system and maintenance and he has been regularly maintaining the system.
He tops our solar batteries with distilled water and cleans the solar panel every month, anything strange to the system to power more lights in other rooms. Properly sized system are therefore, expected to perform well.
It is a misconception of people thinking that one might go for a small size of solar panel and relatively bigger size of batteries in order to maximize electric charge storage. This might be wrongly thought of in order to minimize costs especially on solar panel.
It is true that the system initial costs have an influence on adoption of technology but sometimes the opposite might be the case like what happened to a customer at Orkesumet in Simanjiro district.
Furthermore, avoiding a charge controller in order to save costs, the system was able to power appliances for sometime but his battery was in danger of damage. He experienced dim lights because of low battery state of charge reflected by low voltage. If charge controller was installed lights would have been switched off before he experience dim lights.
That would have given him an advantage of not only safeguarding his battery from reduced life span but also protecting ballasts of fluorescent light from damage as a result of operating low voltage.
Such systems users will find that they are required to replace components quite often. In other words, they will spend more on replacement than what they saved by avoiding use of charge controller.
Some people unknowingly take solar systems installation lightly thinking that they know the technology. Skilled technicians are vital and should strive hard to educate solar systems uses to justify their role. Otherwise few systems will work satisfactory, while others will not.
Harold Yusuf Athuman is a renewable energy Co-ordinator.
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