Water supply Update

The Backwash yield is approx 20,000 litres per hour even in the lean season.
The Srinivas farm yields 3,000 lph in lean season and 9,000 lph is rainy season.
The Panchayat borewell yields 10,000 lph in the rainy season. Lean season yield not known. Started using from July 2009.
The Baskar borewell yielded 2000 lph. Current yield not known.

Lease has been signed (starting July 2009 for Rs 9K for 5 years) with the owner of agricultural land thru which our backwash water supply pipe runs.

TIRA electrical lines

This shows the 3 phase lines to the feeder pillars. The feeder pillars distribute electricity to the houses. Each house is fed from one phase (in general). Periodic load balancing is done at the feeder pillar to ensure that all three phases are loaded the same way.

Water supply in the campus

The lines in Orange denote the supply lines to the hilltop tank. The lines in Blue are 4" main water pipes coming down the hill and the purple lines are 3" (sometimes 2.5") water pipes crossing the main lines. The red boxes are the location of the valves

TIRA boundaries

This map is based on google and gives the actual layout of the campus. please note that the plot sizes are very approximate and should NOT be considered as accurate. The areas in green are common area, the areas in brown are BCIL owned.

Route to Trans Indus

View Trans Indus in a larger map

borewell HP calculation.

say water is being produced at 1800 litres per hour i.e. 1800 kg per hour. say the depth is 230 feet. If it has to be pumped 70 feet to the tank so total of 300 feet = 100 meters. so total amount being pumped is 1800 X 100 kg meters per hour. This is same as 3000 kg m per min. 1 HP = 4500 kg m. So 3000 kg m = 0.66 HP. Keeping any future yields (say double) we need 1.3 HP. Keeping machine inefficiency, friction loss, bend losses, non return valve losses and eddy currents into account, we need 1.5 HP.

Solar powering your house

There are three ways of solar powering the house and going off the grid (really !). They are:

# Photovoltaic cells : The most proven technology, but it would require lots of cells to generate the kind of power needed to run the house. These cells require more square area.
# Concentrated solar panels : The current favourite to power houses. These can be used on all roofs as well as sides of the building and can generate as much as 5 times the power than photovoltaic cells. The only drawback to this is they require clear skies and constant sunshine ( 2 things that are not avaiilable most of the time at TI).
# The third and most interesting method is called Dye Solar Cell. This uses a 2 stage photovoltaic process with chemical reactions with dyes as it's core. There are now glass doors and window panels avalable with this technology built in. These are trasparet glass surfaces with the dye solar cell in between. So you can haave your window (and the view) and generate electricity as you gaze out into the greenery :).

In India, there has been a settlement built in West Bengal that completely goes of the grid. What's more they are even feeding back into the grid when the load int he house is not high. They have tied up with the WB government and they get Rs 7 per kwh for the power sent back to the grid. No other state at this time allows power back into the grid from individuals.

On an average the cost of solarification (is that the right word ?) of a 3 bedroom house works out to around Rs 5.5L currently.

We at TI, in the face of teething power issues that we are facing on a daily basis, need to seriously start evaluating these technologies. Any thoughts, ideas on this would be of utmost interest.