Summer of 2009:
The completion of the susya project
Comet-ME, using funds obtained from the
German representative office in Ramallah
and the
Firedoll
and
Sparkplug
foundations was able to complete the installation
of home systems to all the families living in Susya.
Most of July and the beginning
of August were dedicated to the purchasing, construction and finally the installation
of six more family systems in Susya and the
upgrading of the community utility center
we built in March. The installation itself was great. Very intense, and hot, but
rewarding, with some of the families having to wait for their turn almost a year.
The process took several days in which we worked with Susya maintenance team, the
families and many of our friends (including a group from Engineers Without Borders - Israel).
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Above you can see the new system we installed with the
Abu Malesh family whom we got to know while working on the installation
of the utility center in March. The system there is a typical family
system with three bulbs and an electricity socket to power a charger
or radio. This time around we wired the electric cabinets ourselves,
to reduce costs even further, and changed the operation voltage of the
systems to 220V
AC
so as to allow the users the freedom from specialized
DC
equipment - they can now use regular light bulbs and appliances.
Below you can see Noam trying to figure out which way is which with
the wind turbine upgrade. The whole system is now more powerful then before and
can power two refrigerators; a welcome addition two weeks before the
Ramadan
and the heat of the desert.
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