The bright lights of Kompiam

Finding new technologies to help our customers, the missionaries, churches, and other people in the bush, is an exciting part of my job. For some time I’ve been interested in LED lighting, and since recently their costs have come down, and the brightness has gone up, we decided to stock a range of these lights. They are suited to 12 volt systems, are easy to ceiling mount, and range in power from 0.2 watts up to 1.8 watts.

LED (light emitting diode) lights work differently to other forms of lighting. They are like a high powered version of the little lights on your video player. Being solid state devices they don’t have filaments to burn out, and thus last for thousands of hours. But the main advantage is that they are very energy efficient. A typical light globe is only about 10% efficient, creating far more heat than light, and prone to failure, whereas LED’s convert a far greater percentage of their energy into light. Now when you consider that a solar panel only converts around 10-15% of its sunlight to electricity, is very expensive, and the battery it charges has to keep running all night, you can appreciate that you must make use of every drop of power you get.

Dr David Mills from Kompiam (Enga Baptist Health Service) decided that LED lighting would have a great application in his hospital. Their generator typically runs about 3-4 hrs a night, and diesel is very difficult and expensive to acquire in their remote location. They already had solar lighting, but found the batteries ran flat in about an hour. So recently I flew out there (thanks to MAF) and replaced many of their fluorescent tubes with LED’s. By the end of the week we had wired up all their wards and installed a solar lighting system in another house.

The result… Although they are not as bright as an 18 watt fluorescent tube, now each ward runs on 2.5 watts of power, the lights easily run all night, and they’re strong enough to read by at each bed. An added bonus was training a national worker called Maku, who was with me all week. By the end he was quite proficient at wiring and had even learnt to solder! It was very exciting for me to experience first hand the technical and life challenges that our customers face, and very rewarding to offer some help.

by Michael Wakefield