What You See Is What You Get...

...but isn't necessarily what you wanted.

This week I and my 'boss', Mr P, at the workshop went down to Pindi on another shopping trip - mainly for supplies for the hospital, but also to try and reconnoitre the availabilities and prices of various materials for the solar project.

So after many deals and many cups of tea at various shops (including spending £500 on lightbulbs), we parked the van and hopped into a more nimble rickshaw to head into the narrower, busier streets of the metalworkers' bazaar.



















Riding in this thing feels very much like driving a fairground dodgem - the handling is pretty much identical - only it's more in your interest to avoid the other vehicles rather than take them on. And he can get through some minuscule gaps when he wants to. The bazaar is a bit different from your average one - the stalls/shops are much bigger and generally have piles of interesting things, and various guys making things out of other things.

Anyway, to come to the point of this blog post, here's a representative sample of one of the dual-language, triple-participant conversations in one of the shops. To give a little context, I'm trying to track down some plastic tubing for use as a heat exchanger. It'll need to stand up to nearly 100°C, and there aren't many kinds that'll do that.

(opening pleasantries)

Me: "Do you have any PEX pipe?"

(discussion back and forward between Mr P and shopkeeper in Urdu/Punjabi)

Shopkeeper: "What about this one?" (hands me a bit of tube - a yellow one, 1/2" diameter, no markings)

Me (thinks): "It's a yellow one, 1/2" diameter, no markings..."
Me (out loud): "Umm... what's it made of? It has to not melt at 100°C."

(more Urdu/Punjabi discussion)

Mr P: "Okay, how about this one?" (points out a different one - black, 1" dia, again no markings)

Me (internally): "It's black, 1" dia, again no markings..."
Me (out loud): "Do you know what it's made of? I really need to know the material it's made of before I can tell whether it's suitable or not..."

(more Urdu/Punjabi discussion)

Shopkeeper: "Also, I have this one over here..."

Me (in the privacy of my own head): "But what the @£%$!!ing $£^^@ is it made of???!!!!! Aaaargh!!"

What You See Is What You Get...
...but that doesn't necessarily mean you know what it is, and neither does the shopkeeper.











Random addendum: for ages I've been trying to get a picture of one of the painted trucks at night, because in many cases all that amazing decoration is done in reflective paint. But, not wanting to blind oncoming drivers with my camera flash (road travel here being quite dangerous enough already!), I had to take a short movie and grab a frame from it - not the full glory, but you get the idea:

SWH prototype project part 5 - temperature logging

A quick foray into some electronics, just for a change. The plan is to build a little data logger which will record the temperatures at various points in the panels and tank over the course of the day (or week, or month for that matter) - and thus save me having to take the lid off the tank and check a glass thermometer every hour!

This nifty little screen will eventually give an up-to-the-minute temperature display.



















For my fellow geeks, the red board is a Seeeduino Stalker microcontroller - an Arduino variant with onboard real-time clock and microSD slot for data logging purposes. I'll be connecting up a few MCP9700A thermistors in the next couple of days. In it's current state I have 6 inputs to play with - possibly expandable with a multiplexer at some later stage if I feel like it.

Time and part-availability* permitting I might think about adding a light sensor of some sort, and an alarm for if/when the panels get too hot in summer (so that someone can take some sort of action - probably just shading the panels. It'd be sweet to have some sort of canopy unfurl automatically, but I think that's probably a bit over-ambitious!)

(*a big problem - trade embargoes at the UK end mean RS orders take 6-8 weeks to arrive, after they've obtained an export certificate - I had to get our recent visitors to bring out the thermistors for me. On the other hand, the circuit boards arrived from Singapore without too much hassle...)



















The absence of breadboards means a whole lot of trying to solder ends of wires to each other - a bit messier than I'd like.

I think this soldering iron is designed for somewhat larger applications...

Logging

Coming back from Abbottabad the other day there were some guys doing some logging - apparently part of the latest stretch of road-widening works scattered along the KKH. This is more exciting than it first sounds, when you take into account the fact that they’re doing it right next to the main road. Combine this with the general behaviour of Pakistani traffic, and you get a interesting ten minutes of pleasing chaos.

Given my abject failure to gain any photographic evidence of this fantastic piece of theatre, I shall relate it in the form of scrappily-drawn diagrams.

1. Choose a suitable looking tree.



















2. Create a roadblock with a few branches and sticks. Some drivers take notice and stop.



















3. TIMBERRR!!! (Or the Urdu/Pashto/Hindko equivalent). Given the proximity to all the waiting cars, now 2 or 3 rows abreast, this takes some confidence in your felling angle.



















4. Well done, you’ve successfully avoided hitting any vehicles, and have beautifully blocked the entire road with your tree. Meanwhile, Pakistani drivers not being the epitome of patience, they have continued to fill up any available space. We’re now up to 3 or 4 rows of traffic, leaving only the narrowest possible lane free for any traffic that might want to come the other way.



















5. Chainsaw man begins removing the side branches of his tree. Some of the front row of drivers hop out and move the original road block of sticks.



















6. Chainsaw man finally gets round to cutting the trunk in a couple of places. His helpers start to manoeuvre a section out of the way. In the meantime, having run out of road to fill up, vehicles are now extending the traffic jam sideways out on to the dirt at the side of the road. As I may have already mentioned, patience is for other people.



















7. One particularly impatient driver five or so cars back decides to chance it and races round the very outside, bounces over the remains of the stick-block and charges for the narrow gap where the section of trunk used to be. Unfortunately the gap is a few inches narrower than his car - he just about manages to screech to a halt in time.



















8. The gap is widened enough for a car or two to pass: cue manic free-for-all scramble for the gap. At this point the drivers will be forced to take notice of that glaring flaw in Pakistani traffic self-discipline, that our esteemed readers will have spotted ages ago: namely that making the traffic jam fill the entire width of the road on both sides of the obstacle doesn’t really leave much room for any oncoming traffic to pass.

Many small horn-honking and finger-waving negotiations ensue, with general precedence going to whoever managed to stick their vehicle in the gap first. Looking back, the traffic jam extends as far as we can see. The whole thing only took about ten minutes.

A letter-posting adventure

The little post office in the village let us send our Christmas cards okay, but wouldn't take my Mum's birthday present (something about it being too expensive(?!) - we never quite worked out what the problem was...), so it had to be taken to the main office in the next big town:



















Here is the most excellent sign that greets you as you enter:



















Passing beneath this ambitious declaration you enter a large hall with a huge counter stretching around you on 3 sides. The counter has at least a dozen different service points, each labelled for a different purpose - stamps, letters, parcels, tax payments, gas bill payments, earthquake payments*, etc, etc.

At the counter you don't queue so much as generally barge in to whatever's happening at the time (thankfully it was pretty quiet when we were there, or I don't think we would have managed!). Behind the counter are lots of men, at least two-thirds of them drinking tea or generally not doing anything visibly useful.

After visiting at least three of the windows and flagging down one or two of the idle men, we had to go and find a quiet corner somewhere to apply the stupendous number of stamps required to get the parcel to its destination.

Behold:



















And that's just one side of the parcel! Apparently the largest denomination of stamp they have is Rs25** - around 19p.

The letters get posted into the appropriate box in the spectrum of colours below, and the parcel gets handed to yet another disturbed-from-not-doing-much little man behind yet another counter.

I hope it arrives okay...



















(*We think payments out to earthquake victims, rather than payments for the services of earthquakes. Still, you never know.)

(**I'm sure I've seen Rs30 ones, but apparently not on this day.)

On call...

I had my first on call the weekend before Christmas and I’m very grateful that it’s over for a month.

One patient made me feel like I was participating in a melodramatic soap opera as she told me about the “bahot ziada taklif, doctor saab” (big trouble) that she was experiencing. I could feel myself becoming equally flamboyant as the consultation went on in my attempts to assure her I thought that she was probably going to be alright. (She was.)

One patient came in semi-conscious with at least 10 accompanying relatives who all wanted to talk to me at once. He hadn’t eaten his medicine or applied his injections for 2 weeks (a literal translation from the Urdu) and that isn’t very good for you when you have diabetes.

One baby died on Sunday after struggling for nearly 2 weeks. She had pneumonia and despite our best efforts she didn’t have the strength to fight it any more. The anguish of her mother haunts me as they wrap up the small still body, now peaceful.

Fruit and veg

All this for the grand total of Rs 180 (£1.36) - not bad!

Horsepower

How many horsepower can your toilet paper boast?



















I'm not sure what their point is, but it's still a pretty awesome brand name...

Jo's Birthday Cake

And it tasted good too....

Lepidoptery 6

Another brilliant batch of beautiful butterflies (previous episodes 1, 2, 3, 4, 5):

A Blue Pansy - a different variant from the last one, I think - most of these pics are from a few weeks ago before it got cold, but there are still quite a few of these guys left hanging on even after most of the other species have died off or migrated somewhere warmer:



















A Dark Clouded Yellow:

























A Common Wall:



















A Lime Butterfly - these ones get up to a fairly impressive 10cm wingspan - there were dozens of them enjoying some big red-flowered bushes at a motorway service station on the way to Lahore:



















And another one dreaming wistfully of freedom. Or something. It could be an elegant poetic portrayal of the tragedy of locking up something so beautiful or somesuch, were it not for the fact that the other three sides of the room were open to the fresh air. Stoopid insect:



















A Plain Tiger at our conference in Lahore last month (well, not at the conference, but you know what I mean):



















And from just the other day, apparently still braving the coldness, the grandly titled Queen of Spain Fritillary:

SWH prototype project part 4 - a bigger tank

See also previous instalments.

A solution to the leaking tank problem:



















We lined the box with some plastic sheeting* and after a few unsuccessful attempts found a way of connecting the tubes in a non-leaking manner using a short length of metal pipe and those metal hose ties you tighten up with a screwdriver. But then it was time to think a little bigger.

(*One of the recurring issues we have here is the question "what is this made of?". Will it melt? Dunno. Will it degrade over time? No idea. Will dangerous chemicals leach into the water? Who can tell? (Don't worry, this is only a temporary solution, and no-one will be drinking the water!) At the bazaar WYSIWYG applies, but that's only any use for those properties measured using the eyes and/or fingertips.)

Also, behold Peter, engineering student from NZ who is over for 6 weeks. In that Christian community small world way, it turns out he knows one of our friends from home...

And now behold one of our workshop buddies, ignoring all health-and-safety notions in true Pakistani style. While this photo doesn't belong here in any kind of thematic sense, it does in a camera-memory-card-chronological sense, and it looked cool. So there.



















So here's baby tank's big brother in situ, constructed in a similar manner (wood frame supporting polystyrene insulation lined with plastic sheeting). This one contains about 59 litres, including the water in the panel and tubes. As you can see, in its current position, the sun disappears behind a tree around 2.30pm, so we've got a bit of repositioning to do.

And here is a pretty rainbow-coloured graph depicting the other day's temperature variations - this tank got up to around 45°C, which is a fair bit lower than the small tank (as you would expect), but actually represents nearly a 3-fold increase in the amount of useful energy harvested. (Lower tank temp means lower heat losses, and this tank has a relatively smaller surface area to lose heat from.)

Towards the end of the day we got round to drilling a hole in the top of the panel so we could measure the panel temperature, hence the blue line appearing at the right hand side.



















To be continued...

Nativity - Doctor Who style...

The wise men are clearly Ood. That is all.

Chocolate Caramel Disaster

One of my favourite sweet treats is millionaire’s shortbread (also known as chocolate caramel shortbread). There’s something about that combination of biscuit, soft caramel and a good thick layer of chocolate (preferably dark) that is just sublime.

So, I’ve been trying to make it.

Attempt 1
I’m not sure what exactly went wrong but I suspect that it may have something to do with the inability of our gas stove to do a low heat. The recipe said to boil up the sugar, condensed milk and butter for 5 minutes, but after this amount of time my caramel layer turned out to be filling-extractingly solid. It was edible, but hard work on the jaw.
















Attempt 2
So then I tried a different method for my caramel, the boil-a-tin-of-condensed-milk-in-a-pressure-cooker-for-30-minutes method. This time the caramel has turned out so soft you need a spoon to eat it with. Again it’s edible, but somehow not quite right.

So, any tips or recipe suggestions for attempt 3 gratefully received....

Euphemisms and pregnancy

People are very polite about pregnancy here and the subject would certainly never be discussed with men present. However, a lot of the women I see in the clinic are either pregnant or wanting to be, so I’m rapidly the myriad number of ways to tell someone you’re expecting a baby in urdu.

Hamla is the adjective that means you’re pregnant, (this is the same word used for attack!).

Kuch hai literally means "is there anything" but shouldn't be used unless you do want to ask someone if they're pregnant.

Bacha pate mey is a bit rough and ready and literally means “baby stomach in”.

Bimar is the word for being ill, but also colloquially used for having a baby (or incidentally, your monthly period). As you can imagine, there is considerable potential for confusion.

Bacha honevala hai which seems to be less commonly used but I think would literally translate as “baby to be coming is”.

And finally, umeed se hai, which means that “there is hope”, perhaps the nicest I think.

SWH prototype project part 3 - it lives!

Work on the solar water heater felt like it had ground to a halt somewhat this week due to one thing or another, but yesterday we finally got it moved out of the workshop and into the sun on the other side of the compound. (This was no small operation, our ridiculously overweight panel taking 5 men to lift, with considerable effort - we're going to have to rethink the idea of putting it on the laundry roof!)

This is very much a "lets-just-see-if-it-works"-type test, and thus has all sorts of caveats and problems built in from the word go. The first one being that as soon as the plastic piping we used to connect it up warmed up slightly, its flexibility increased, and it sagged, immediately preventing the thermosyphon effect from taking place.

(A quick lesson: In order for the water to circulate by itself, the piping must be 'uphill' all the way from the lowest point of the loop to the highest. Then, as the water is heated in the panel, it becomes less dense and rises up, whilst the denser, colder water in the tank sinks down the other side of the loop into the bottom of the panel. The water heats up a little more on each cycle through the panel, gradually raising the temperature of the tank water. The neat thing about this setup is that at night the circulation stops naturally once the panel temperature drops below the tank temperature, thus preventing the panel from radiating away all that heat you've carefully collected - and no valves or pumps required.)



















Problem 1 solved (for the time being at least):



















A most encouraging sight (hot water entering the tank - click on the picture for a larger, clearer view):

























Problem number two. This impromptu water tank is made from a polystyrene cold box I found lying around. I knew it was going to leak, but it managed nearly a day-and-a-half before it became a problem - more than enough for the first try:



















It's also a very small volume for this panel, around 13 litres including the water in the pipework. The next step will be to make a tank bigger than this, yet smaller than the big blue behemoth - perhaps around 50 litres, with decent insulation, so we can gather some more useful data from it.

And on that subject, oh for a nice datalogger and some thermistors! At the moment I have 3 glass/liquid thermometers of slightly dubious accuracy, which I obviously have to directly observe every time I want a reading.

Still, we hit 63°C after a couple of hours, which is nice. It was too hot for me to rescue my thermometer by hand when I accidentally dropped it into the tank.

Projects for the next few weeks:

• make a ~50 litre insulated tank.
• move panel another 20 yards so it's not shaded at certain times in the afternoon.
• give it some legs to prop it up at the right angle so it's actually pointing at the sun.
• build a platform for the water tank to sit on.
• connect it up with some proper pipework.
• run some day-long and week-long tests.
• work out how on earth to strip about 50% of the weight out of the design!

SWH prototype project part 2

Yesterday I finally got the panel connected up and heating some water, but before I recount that story in the next post, I thought I'd better fill you in on the rest of the panel-building. Here's the panel innards more-or-less complete, after much sledghammering and much nut-and-bolting:



















And now painted black and dropped into the outer frame:



















Our spray-paint claims to be flat black, but it does have a distinctly satin finish to it. Better than straight gloss, but I think we'll shop around for a bit longer next time.

Two layers of glazing in place, and in the process of being secured down:



















We sliced up some old tyre innertubes for use as gasket material. 6" x 4" sheets of glass are not easy to work with, and contribute to this thing weighing far too much. We managed to get both sheets in with only one small corner damaged, however.

Next, we 'reclaimed' this unused water tank from the roof of the operating theatre:



















This one is actually far too huge for our prototype panel, and will be more suited for when we have the much bigger array of panels for the laundry. Perhaps we'll be able to run it at quarter volume or so for now.

Because it'll (hopefully) be holding warm water, we have to get some insulation around it:





















This is a start using what we had lying around, but I think we'll have to make a few improvements to it before we use it for real. All this wood has been used at least once before - removing all the old nails and so on adds at least the same amount of time and effort again as the actual construction does.

On to the testing...