Trip to Nepal

Our trip to our friend’s wonderful Hindu wedding in Nepal was quite an eye opener in every way.

One of the poorest places on earth – mean pay $240 pa … & horrendous water problems – as below. 13,000 children die pa from bad water.

1. River Pollution

Drainage is a significant problem in Kathmandu. Due to an inadequate and technically unsound

drainage system, water backlogging is very common in many areas of the city. In most places,

both storm water drainage and sewerage has been combined. Many illegal sewerage connections

into the storm water drains are common. At this time, there is no mechanism for KMC or other

municipalities and the Department of Sewerage to check these illegal connections. Although

there are some waste water treatment systems in Kathmandu Valley, these are not functional and

as a result waste water from the drains and sewers are discharged directly into the Bagmati,

Bishnumati, Dhobi Khola and other rivers of KV without treatment. Along with an increase in

population and unplanned and haphazard urbanization, the city is becoming an example of a

terribly polluted city with open sewers and unhygienic disposal of waste leading to the pollution

of all the existing rivers in Kathmandu.”

While they have substantial rainfall & 3 medium sized rivers flowing through the town. People are streaming in from the countryside – the population 10 years ago was 988,341 & now it is 1,442,762. The place is bursting, & its only 30 km square.

I suggest boatmen fitted with the simple thermal still, driven by a vertical axis water turbine under the hull – powered by those currents. They may be sluggish, but that amount of water moving at any speed represents power – which can be extracted by a suitably matched turbine. And they could discharge their fresh water to containers on the shore for the water to be collected. We often saw people carrying containers of water on their backs & heads.

They do have substantial Katabatic winds of up to force 6 twice a day – but not till you get out to Mustang, up n the hills 200km away from Kathmandu. The winds in Kathmandu are light.

Since the polystyrene block thermal still – assembled by the buyers will be a small fraction of the cost of the equivalent RO or VC unit, if I can get the output up to a quarter of theirs, we will have a product. We’ll see how near I have got by the time we meet at the end of the month.