Steve and Barnabas in Tanzania

The kids getting ready for the water to flow In the USA we really don’t think that much about water.   I realize if you are dealing with a flood you think about non-stop.   But for most of us it really is not something we think about until we get the bill every month.    You go to the faucet and turn it on.   The biggest problem most people have now is figuring out where the sweet spot on the hands-free sensor is to get and keep the water running.   The new controls wired in What you don’t have to worry about is how far you must walk to get water, or how far you must drive your cattle to get water.   You don’t think about getting your donkeys ready to carry a bunch of water jugs for you.   When you want to do laundry, you most likely go to a machine in your house and it is already connected to the water for you.   You don’t have to carry your laundry to the water and wash it in front of everybody else in the village.   ...

This last week I got a chance to visit a site where USAID and various charities had put in a solar water pump system in a community.  The system was put in roughly two years ago and quit working several months ago.  I was going to see if I could find out what was wrong with the system.  My expectations on the system were that it would be a fairly simple system with a solar system set up to power a standard pump drawing water from one of the hand dug wells this community has an abundance of.   What I found when I got there was anything but.  It was an expensive, very advanced system that used four solar panels generating over 100 watts each to an electrical box that was connected to a computer chip controlling a sleeve pump that was inside a bored well.  The well was bored to 65 meters.  Feeling inadequate to fix this was an understatement. I did test the things I could and found it was in the control of the pump where the problem was.  ...