Today, the village leaders gave me a really cool Christmas present. Actually, it wasn’t really for me, but I like to imagine it was. They finally made good on their promise to install an electrical service for the computer center I’m trying to help them set up. Now we have almost everything ready to actually open the computer center, and the hardest part is behind us (I hope). I just have to figure out what’s wrong with the drivers for the ancient graphics cards I have :/ and collect the rest of the furniture donated by the local carpenters.
Since I get excited about architectural issues, I am going to talk a bit about the specifics of the electrical work. Some of you may want to tune out at this point; it might get boring.
Like most things in Guatemala, there is a very limited amount of skilled labor. The elders paid an electrician from San Sebastian Coatán, the town across the valley, to come over and install the service. But another thing about Guatemala is that everyone fearlessly jumps in and helps, in a very get-it-done spirit. Nas and Manuel and Elias all passed tools, climbed ladders, and so forth to help.
The photo on the left is the electrician, climbing the closest power pole. He does this with two loops of rope tied into larkshead knots around the pole. He then steps into the open loops and slides them up the pole, one at a time, until he reached the top. Guessing from the arrangement of wires and the transformer two poles away, all power to the village is single-phase. I don’t know what the primary voltage is (the top two wires) but it’s stepped down to 120V for local use. I’ve heard mention before that a few of the carpenters have 240V in their shops, and they had to pay extra for it. After looking at the transformer a second time* and talking with Jerry, we decided that the power here is a center-tapped split phase system. There is a great article about it on Wikipedia.
After he finished splicing the building service to the wires above, The electrician ran the service through a weatherhead at the building. This seemed pretty silly to me, since the steel conduit extends about a foot below the edge of the picture, then just stops and the wires stick out of it.
Once that was in place, the electrician drove a 8′ copper-clad grounding rod into the earth. I was pretty surprised by this; those sort of advanced precautions seem to be outside of normal practice here. They use a clamp to attach the groundwire to the grounding rod, though, instead of the exothermic connection that Jerry would have me specify on a job in the US.
This is the infamous meter, cause of many a delay in my Computer Center project. The leaders have been working on getting this thing for over a year. Apparently, they even bought a different one in town many months ago, about the time that the electrical utility finally made it mandatory to only use one of THEIR meters. I never could get a straight answer on whether or not they got their money back on the now-useless meter. This new one, though, is utility approved and is also WAY smaller than any meter I’ve ever seen before.
A quick hole in the wall, a few wires poked through, and we’re ready to connect to our “electrical panel”, a 40A breaker (or flipón) in a metal enclosure. A pair of wires sticking out of the bottom will soon be connected to the electrical outlet circuit in the computer room. I have a feeling that I am going to get to install all of that electrical work. The leaders told me to give them a list of what’s required and they’d take care of it, but I can imagine it taking another few months for them to get around to it. I’ll give them the shopping list, but if I get my computers up and running in the next few days, I will probably just go buy the stuff myself.
*Here is how the transformers and wires are laid out:
