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.

Welcome

Dear Ti'ites,
A welcome note to all of you who are going to be following this blog. This blog is intented to highlight the various maintenance issues that we face during the day to day operations on the campus and the solutions that have been implemented, or the solutions that have been considered. This will ensure continuity across various councils over various years and make sure we have a log of what needs to be done during emergencies. Feel free to send your suggestions to the authors for any particular topic that needs to be part of the blog. These include power, water, common area issues that could affect the community or could affect individual members

Water Supply Issues

Water in the campus comes from the hill top tank. The alternative is to fill your personal sump with tanker water.

The hilltop tank has a capacity of 150,000 litres. The metering is done by submersible pole which is divided into 7 steps. The tank is good enough for 4 days of water supply. Nayak is in charge of ensuring that the tank has water. He also controls the release of water to the campus which is done twice a day.

The hilltop tank is filled from 3 sources.

(a) Srinivas farm: this has a 10 HP 3 phase borewell pump and a small holding tank that is filled from the borewell pump and a 10 HP 3 phase monoblock pump to move the water to the hilltop. The farm is owned by Alt-tech foundation that is a subsidiary of BCIL (the promotors of Trans Indus). They do not do any maintenance and it is up to TIRA to maintain the borewell and the pump. The water is the borewell fluctuates during the seasons as there are a lot of borewells in the area rangin from 3000 litres per hour to 10,000 litres per hour. We have backup borewell and monoblock pumps in case the current ones need repair.
The KEB supply comes under the Talaghattapura jurisdisction. To get the KEB to do anything, the BCIL representatives have to be contacted. The KEB supply is at commercial rates.

(b) Baskar's borewell. Baskar has a borewell in his plot that supplies water at 1800 litres per hour. The borewell has a 10 HP borewell pump which is too much and noisy and therefore needs to be replaced by a 1.5 HP pump. The 10 HP pump requires the running of the 60 KVA generator and replacing it with a 1.5 HP pump will allow the usage of the 30 KVA generator.

(c) Backwash borewell. This was done in 2007 and yields 18000 litres an hour. this has a 10 HP 3 phase borewell pump which sends water along 400 yards of tubing to a 7000 litre sump in the campus. a 10 HP monoblock motor in the sump sends the water to the hilltop. This borewell is powered by KEB Kaglipura. An application has been made to KEB to regularise the meter at commercial rates. This land is owned by Thimaiah, an ex BCIL employee. The pipes go thru various agricultural lands. Although legally no one can stop up drawing pipes thru any land, practically the farmers have disruptive power and can break the pipes. The owner of one of the lands, Gopalakrishna, has negotiated a 5 year lease with us of Rs 9000 per month for the use of his land. (update on 21. Jul. 2009)

All three sources feed into the same pipe to the hilltop. The pipes feeding the tank are 10 years old and need to be replaced.

If there is no KEB power, neither srinivas nor backwash borewells would work. Sometimes, if the kaglipura KEB fails, there is power in the srinivas farm. The borewell in baskar's plot can but run but will require 75 hours to fill the tank.

There is no access to the hilltop to fill it up by tankers.

(d) a fourth source of water is from the panchayat borewell. although all connections have been done, this borewell is also dependent on the kaglipura KEB power source. therefore this source has not been activated as it does not serve any purpose right now. If we lose access to backwash, this would need to be activated. Update on 17.Jul.2009 -> since the backwash water supply was cut, this option has been activated. The yeild of this is approx 10,000 litres per hour.