Updates from Nepal's Pilot Schools

[david at lang.hm]

On Sun, 9 Mar 2008, Bryan Berry wrote:

> David, good idea.
>
> there are only about 6 light bulbs at the Bishwamitra (smaller school)
> and less than 5 at Bashuki the larger school.

that may not be enough to matter. on one of the wiki pages it mentioned 
25-30 as a number. switching to LED's will save about 90% of the power 
that the bulbs currently use (plus they will last essentially forever)

> I will have to ask Ram (our power guy) about what's available on the
> local market.

LED lights are not readily available in the local market even in the US, 
they tend to be internet orders only

> Regards to getting some for free, it would be great if you could put us
> in contact w/ someone to donate them. In my experience it can be very
> expensive time-wise to seek donations from companies w/out an existing
> personal connection. Sometimes it just cheaper to buy something than to
> spend the time trying to get a donation. That said, a strong personal
> connection can make it very easy to get a donation.

I don't have any personal contacts.

David Lang

> On Sun, 2008-03-09 at 04:26 -0700, david at lang.hm wrote:
>> On Sun, 9 Mar 2008, Bryan Berry wrote:
>>
>>> Sulochan Acharya and I are keeping journals of Nepal's pilot schools on
>>> the wiki and the OLE Nepal blog.
>>>
>>> http://blog.olenepal.org/
>>>
>>> http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Bashuki_Journal
>>> http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Bishwamitra_Journal
>>>
>>> We will do our best to keep updating the wiki pages.
>>>
>>> We hope that reporting this info will be helpful to other pilot sites
>>> and to the larger OLPC community.
>>
>> thanks for posting this info.
>>
>> one thing that struck me as i was reading your write-ups was about the
>> power problems. both schools have very limited power, one of the schools
>> mentioned the power consumption of the light bulbs as part of the
>> calculation. Assuming that they schools are useing conventional light
>> bulbs, they could probably save more power than the laptops need to charge
>> by switching to a high-efficiancy bulb.
>>
>> given the unreliable power, florecent bulbs are probably not a reasonable
>> option, but (assuming theft is not too big a factor) LED bulbs would last
>> and save the power needed to run the other equipment.
>>
>> equipping a school with such bulbs is not cheap (a few thousand dollars
>> per school), but there may be charities around who could fund this. I'm
>> willing to bet that nobody has ever asked them to fund anything like this.
>>
>> you may be able to get some donations from the manufacturers as well.
>>
>> David Lang
>
>