I’ve just recently returned from Rwanda where Catapult is conducting an energy audit on a hospital in Gitwe, southwest of Gitarama in the Ruhango District, for a back-up energy system. When a structure (home, hospital, school) is connected to the grid, it doesn’t necessarily mean that electrical power is acquired in the same way it is for Catapult’s studio in San Francisco. Below is a quick diagram illustrating how power is purchased for a grid-connected home in rural or urban Rwanda. Pre-paid energy systems don’t capture energy usage patterns in the same way our electrical bills do, making energy audits a little tricky. Something to keep in mind if you’re assessing energy needs in grid-connected communities…
COMMENTS
Cool! I like the comic format for the graphic. Is there a reason why you could not capture this information with a prepaid system?
I was just in NYC and toured the Tenement Museum — they have a restored home from about 1900 and in the kitchen was a gas system that took nickels. They said a nickel (inserted into the machine above your stove) lasted about a week, including all of the lights, if you were careful to keep them on the lowest setting.
Apparently it was a well-known hack to shave ice into the appropriate shape — it would melt and hide the evidence from the gas attendant!
Ha! Shaved ice nickels is clever.
In terms of the difficulties in collecting information on pre-paid systems, unless the home has a tracking system for energy usage it is difficult to do without manually going around to each appliance and measuring the energy usage and tracking it by hand on a spreadsheet. The benefit to the pay-per-use electrical connection in our homes (assuming you’re in the US) is that that system is built in — it’s how electrical companies know how much to charge us in our monthly bill. And these days most electrical companies produce graphs/charts to illustrate your average and daily energy consumption. (An energy audit would reveal which appliances in your home make up the majority of that consumption.)
Thanks for the comment and the story!
Keep posting stuff like this i really like it
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