Wednesday 22 February 2012

Kenya 2012

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Kenya 2012, a set on Flickr.

Guguplex was in Kenya in January installing solar systems in the west and centre of the country working with a child sponsorship organisation and a home for street children.

Friday 6 January 2012

Nice Photo Project

This gentleman has been exploring the theme of living without light and has created a great slideshow video of his travels. Check out the link below. http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/peterdicampo/life-without-lights?ref=category

Thursday 29 December 2011

Suriname Adventures

New Flickr Slideshow from our Suriname Trip

Guguplex in Suriname

It's been a little while but we had an amazing trip to Suriname in December travelling up the Maroni river to Grand Santi on the border with French Guiana to install solar systems in some of the communities up there. Their remoteness and the costs of transport and petrol to power generators means that solar systems offer a much more cost effective option for them to receive electricity. It looks like Suriname will be a big part of Guguplex's future work!

I've put a short video of some of our adventures up on youtube.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w12ujG7qJQo&context=C3c6e513ADOEgsToPDskKfZ3Rb1LN7ttZcQpU_Gzqf

Next Guguplex is off to Kenya in January 2012 to install a solar system for a children's home and to work with a major Christian Child Sponsorship Organisation to provide solar systems for some of their centres. God just keeps opening doors for us and we are really excited about what opportunities will come along in 2012!

With solar prices continuing to drop and systems becoming ever more affordable the technology is coming within the reach of more and more of the 1.4 billion people who live off-grid.


Saturday 5 November 2011

More Nigeria Pictures

Some more pictures from our trip.
Local Village Church


 Local wildlife - about 6 inches long!
 Communal Well - about 20m deep
 Rice growing in the fields.
 Local village children coming to see what the excitement was all about!
 Light installed at door entrance to house.

 Light inside a living room.
 Solar panel mounted on top of a church.
Solar charge controller wired and ready for action.

Guguplex goes to Nigeria!

We are just back from an amazing two week visit to Nigeria. In a country where more than 60-70% of people do not have electricity (100 million+) you can see the need for solar power but even we were overwhelmed by the response we got.

Local churches took a particular interest and we spoke to several thousand people in five different churches on one Sunday morning sharing the vision for solar power in rural areas. Because many of the churches are actively engaged with rural communities they saw the benefits straight away.

We have partnered with a local Nigerians to set-up Guguplex Nigeria Ltd. and ran a solar workshop for over 150 people on the possibilities and benefits of solar systems and had several approach us with a view to becoming distributors of our products.

We installed three solar systems in rural areas in two houses and a church and a water pumping system in a communal well and have left another 6 systems to be installed by Guguplex Nigeria over the coming month. These early installations are giving us excellent feedback on the performance of the systems and how people are using them which allows us to improve the systems and how they are configured. We quickly realised that even in basic village homes people wanted 4+ lights even if they were all not used at the same time as many homes are made up of multiple small rooms rather than large open plan living areas.

The other revelation was the amount of money people spend powering generators. Nigeria is the world's largest import market for generators and all though cheap to buy, running costs even with the heavily subsidised local petrol soon mount up. We were able to demonstrate to people how over a 3 year period a generator would be 2-3 times as expensive to run as a similarly functional solar system.

We are now planning to make available a significant number of solar systems in Nigeria by February due to the demand we had and the market potential within Nigeria. Both awareness of and availability of solar equipment there is quite low so we have a big opportunity to educate and inform people as to what is now possible with solar technology.

Below are some of the images of our adventures - there is now Light where previously there was none!





Thursday 13 October 2011

Nigeria Visit


Off to Nigeria on Monday for a follow up visit to our initial trial in June. This time we will be expanding it significantly as well as attending the Nigeria Alternative Energy expo. We're aiming to run workshops for local people interested in getting involved and trialling new equipment in key villages. A great opportunity to see how people approach our products and what kind of uses they put them to.

We will be posting pictures and videos on here over the coming two weeks.