Engineering Nepali Style...

There is a counter intuitive saying that "you can't afford low quality...", and that's the theme for this post.

Our blog posts have been overwhelmingly positive but every once in a while it's worthwhile taking a critical eye to your surroundings to keep you grounded in reality. In short I (Bill) can't leave you with the thought that it's all just wonderful everywhere we go. Some places leave a little bit to be desired.

And so Nepal is going to be the target of the criticism but we could just as easily criticize several other countries we have been to, particularly Jordan and Egypt but there are others. So, the general theme here applies to a lot of places and isn't necessarily solely pointed at Nepal.

Anyway, back to the theme. In essence I saw a lot of attempts to save money in getting something done in Nepal that ended up biting them later on. I'll serve up three clear examples.

What did the Romans ever do for us

First up, the roads. Nepali roads are awful even though more that 2000 years ago the Romans figured out that investing in roads made good sense and they figured out how to make them last so well that they are still using them today.

Nepal is one of the most mountainous countries in the world, particularly where we were so you have to give them some credit, roads aren't easy here. We had the misfortune to ride along one of the mountain roads in a Mahindra 4x4 and it was 4.5 hours of this:

Imagine 4.5 hrs of this... with 12 of us in this:

I present to you the Mahindra Bolero Camper, a poorly masked torture device...

And beyond being an uncomfortable ride, the knock on effects of having a poor road like this are substantial. You can't drive more than about 10 MPH on this kind of road, not much faster than walking. People and things take a long time to get where they're going, you have to use more expensive jeeps, the jeeps break down all the time, use a lot more tires, and people are reluctant to go where they might want or need to go.  This road was a ton of work, by hand, long sections required making a notch in a sheer wall of rock for the road to hang along the side of this huge gorge.

One section of the road that was notched out of a cliff. Looking at the tooling marks it all appears done by hand

The real kicker here is that the road could be much much better, and probably was when it was first established but due to poor construction it had deteriorated rapidly and substantially. I'm not even a civil engineer but it didn't take long to pick out some substantial issues.

Put a road on the side of a gorge/valley and water will need to cross it... therefore eroding it.

Pretty little stream, corrosive little stream crossing the road, making misery for the users...

The road runs up a valley that in some areas is a steep walled gorge. As always, water flows down and has to cross the road. As it flows across the road day in and day out, the water will take some of the road with it. Where it exits the road it will make the road narrower, less stable, and prone to landslides. The areas where the water ran across the road were especially rough because any dirt between the rocks that would have made the road smooth already got taken away. The flow usually isn't straight across either, sometimes there would be 100 yard sections with water flowing down the entire way.

This is the part where I say you can't afford low quality. The solution is simple, you dig a ditch across the road, put an appropriate sized pipe in and bury the pipe. Problem solved... If you don't have pipe you can cobble something together by placing rocks over the ditch. Not that expensive or technically advanced, not much extra effort compared to what had already been done, but for whatever reason this road only had a few spots where this was done:

One of the few examples of water being managed while crossing the road.

In the few spots where they did do something to get the water across the road you have to think that one of two things happened: either it was very clear that they had to do something or the road collapsed and then they had to do something. Ounce of prevention, pound of cure... you can't afford low quality.

Thermodynamics isn't that hard

Thermodynamics has a reputation of being this intractable subject but it's really not that bad. Every warm shower you take depends on managing heat so that you can look forward to a shower rather than dread it. We found ourselves dreading showers because you really never knew what you were going to get, they were hot, cold and under the worst circumstances they turned cold once you got soaped up... In this case managing the heat boils down (ha ha) to one adage: don't waste the heat.

I'll present exhibit A, a solar hot water set up on a lodge:

Here we have a solar collector on a roof with two additional (black) tanks for hot water placed nearby. The water tanks are above the collector, heat rises so the hot water accumulates in the tanks and the cold water descends to be warmed by the collector. Yay! We're done right?

Not so fast... That's where the good news stops. The bad news is that the two additional water tanks are not insulated, so during the cold night, and they were cold nights, heat gets taken away from the warm water. Harder to see is that there is no insulation on the pipes either, more heat loss, and pipes have a lot of surface area compared to the tanks. Insulation is cheap... but we didn't see any anywhere.

Next issue is that during the afternoon those two tanks put the collector in the shade... so they lose a good chunk of the time when they can get free hot water, free that is after you've paid for the system.

So between the lack of insulation, the shaded collector, and probably poor collector sizing calculations you get hot water shortages. So after pouring in a bunch of equipment and labor you have a system that doesn't give your patrons a hot shower... the solution? Insulate the pipes/tanks, don't shade the collector, and do your homework on how big the collector needs to be so that you know it will do the job you're spending your precious money on.

Band-aid Solutions

So now many of these lodges are in the situation that they've got a solar hot water set up that doesn't allow for enough hot showers. At their wits end, the innkeeper then spends money and puts in on-demand gas fired hot water heaters and you end up with a set up that looks like this:

On the right is the initial attempt at hot showers from solar hot water, on the left is the band aid solution, an on-demand hot water heater

The rest of the set up above, note no insulation on the hot water pipes, if you can find them...

I honestly don't have much issue with the incredibly shoddy workman ship in the above pictures, yeah, its horrible but they're doing the best that they can, it works and they can fix it quickly. My issue is that they spend money on two different systems to do the same job, solar and gas, when if they did it right the first time they would only have spent money on one system.

I'm not taking sides here, saying you must use solar, or that gas is the only way. Both have their merits, solar might not work in some of the deeper gorge areas, gas might be exorbitantly expensive, I don't know, don't care, I just want a hot shower and getting a hot shower means doing your homework.

All of this stuff interlocks, the internet and cell service was unreliable and slow to recover, probably because it takes so long to get someone to where the problems need to be fixed because the roads are crappy. Because the internet is crappy it's harder for locals to research out how to do things right... I could go on forever but you get the idea.

In short, getting technology to improve your life means doing your homework...making sure you get good quality, whatever that might mean.