April 19 – May 18: Nepal… the first part
Please see my full year trip log Sept. 2022 – Sept. 2023
Wednesday, April 19, 2023
I arrive in Kathmandu, and everything is softer than New Delhi, slower. I am careful to get a SIM card and cash in the airport. As I leave the airport, a taxi driver offers me a ride. I tell him I’m going to walk to a restaurant. I was headed the wrong way… he shows me where to go. He asks that I take his number and poses for a picture. I go to the restaurants, sit for a bit and go to find a taxi… I take someone else. As another taxi driver solicits me, I hail a different taxi that is unaware of my presence. I really didn’t need to be concerned. The taxi driver who was soliciting me listens to where I’m going and tells me that the taxi I hailed will be a good taxi for me. As we were driving through Kathmandu, the driver said, “traffic is crazy.”… I said “no”.
Coco, Garrett’s fiancee, had directed me to a nice guesthouse for about $6 per night. The manager had sent me the wrong pin, so my taxi driver drove around for a long time finding the right place. He didn’t complain, but I gave him more money anyway.
I met Coco at the Tharlam Monastery and we had dinner.
Thursday, April 20, 2023
Coco took me to RYI, the foremost institute for Buddhism. I was allowed to sit in on a small class… “The Way of the Bodhisattva.” It was the second last class in the semester, so I didn’t expect to follow everything.
In the afternoon, I attended a virtual Finovista meeting dedicated to DC solar cooking. They allowed me to make a short presentation at the end… just 5-minutes. Based on Sheetal’s direction, I spent a few hours recasting my presentation into ISECooking, Product and Process to be more product-oriented rather than a documentary of what we’ve done. About 5 people from the talk asked for more information.
Friday, April 21, 2023
A morning of exquisite timing! I had three meetings by noon, and the first two ended because the person I met with had to leave town for more than a week. Simon had connected me with Biraj, the CEO of PEEDA (People Energy & Environment Development Association). Biraj impressed me at having read through all my material, and was already interested in what I’m doing. Biraj called RERL (Renewable Energy for Rural Livelihood Programme), where I gave a brief presentation to Satish and Jiwan, who made an appointment, and drove me to meet Bikram, who runs Nepal Yantrashala Energy (NYSE), a small factory that has made and installed more than 300 microhydro power plants… mostly in Nepal, but also in Africa and other Asian countries.
There is no longer demand for microhydro, so the plant has shifted other energy-related production. In particular, they produce insulated water heaters that deliver 20 liters of 90 C water in the morning heated with 300 W of grid electricity during the night… for cooking.
They are well set up to instead of heating 2o kg of water to 90 C, they could heat 20 kg of Aluminium to 300 C for high-performance cooking. Raising 20 kg of aluminium from 100 C to 320 C requires 1 kWh of electricity (3 hrs 20 minutes at 300 W)… enough to boil 10 kg of water. And so, we will meet Sunday to start building. In Nepal, Saturday is not a work day, but folks work on Sundays.
The traffic through the tiny alleys of Boudha motivated me to jump from the taxi early… as I walked, I had a funny feeling. Water! Was someone throwing out bath water, filtering through the trees? Wow it’d been about 2 months since I’d experienced rain. I went to the top of the guesthouse to see the rain clear the sky as the wind blew.
In the evening, I saw the mountains for the first time from the top of the restaurant where Coco and I had dinner.
Saturday, April 22, 2023
I started the morning with a free community yoga class with Coco. I went to a yoga class once about 30 years ago. It made me realize how I’ve been neglecting my body. I realized everything is sore on me, and it felt so good to move and stretch. Then we went to a market and had breakfast. A woman there was selling brightly colored reusable menstrual pads herself. I thought about the group in 392 I had dedicated to creating this product for Uganda mentored by Professor Joni Roberts (Kinesiology). The woman suggested I get one for my wife or daughter. I responded that my daughter would have to make that decision.
Sunday, April 23, 2023
Sunday in Nepal is a regular working day, so we looked around for yoga, around the Boudha Stupa, sacred building where the ashes of the Buddha lie. No one goes inside, but people walk around it, clockwise from above. After we found no yoga, Coco held the session in the Utpala yoga room for me and her friend Kiki. Incidentally, Kiki, is from Bhutan, and is studying Buddhist scripture translation. She’s almost done with her study and is looking for opportunities in USA academia.
In the afternoon, I took a motorcycle back to industrial South Kathmandu to start work on the ISECooker with Bikram. The traffic was at a standstill so long that, noticing there was less than a mile to go, I got off the motorcycle and walked. Bikram and I visited the neighboring aluminium pot factory run by Pranish. We bought three small aluminium pots for the heated nest and cookpot as well as a pot for the exterior shell with an inner diameter of 45 cm.
Monday, April 24, 2023
After Yoga, Niko admonishes me for my steady consumption of Ibuprofen to manage arthritic pain, predicts gastritis and sends me off to a traditional Tibetan medical clinic. On my way, I reflect on my acute stomach pain, nausea, headache and insomnia.
I meet a Tibetan Yogini, who invites me to meet her Bhutanese guru, Dungse Garab Rinpoche. At the stupa, she presents me with a medallion and a frock and the guru blesses me (and well over 100 others) into Buddhism by placing the frock over my head. Afterwards, we make two loops around the Boudha Stupa, and I help two older women arrange a bucket of flowers on a shrine.
Wednesday, April 26, 2023
Coco slept through yoga today, but joined me later for breakfast. She took off after a bit, but I stayed a few hours working on my laptop. After a few hours, I asked the waitress passing by if she wanted me to pay her. She agreed. I asked if she remembered what I had. She did. I asked if Coco had paid for her breakfast or both of ours… as it’s customary for one person to pay for everyone. She didn’t know if Coco paid. Also, Coco could have paid at the entrance in a different building. There ensued an inquiry until I asked if I should just call Coco. Coco said, “Oh, I’m so sorry! I forgot.” I was happy to pay the bill for both of us… it was 550 Rupees, or about $4.
A few days ago, a Russian threesome left their room on the top floor to live in an Indian Ashram, and I moved in. It costs about $9 rather than the $6 I was paying because it’s a double… which I don’t really need. But it’s higher and quieter, and opens onto the roof with a view that’s… pretty good.
There’s two other rooms on the roof. Norman from China stays in one. He’s been living 5 years in Thamel, a commercial neighborhood in Kathmandu. The other room was kind of mysterious. There were people coming in and out… monks. I asked to go into it today. It’s a Buddhist holy place. Monks hold ceremonies with lots of incense, drums, symbols, and droning… in the afternoons. I like it. They’ve been holding a 3-day puja for a sick person. It turns out that the sick person is in China. He/She can’t come to Nepal, so they sent money for the monks to hold this spiritual ceremony to help them get better.
Thursday, April 27, 2023
I went to Teku, the “hardware district” to check out what I can purchase and/or import. I left immediately after yoga to beat the awful traffic. Things don’t start running here until after 9:00, so I could leave Boudha and get to Teku in reasonable fashion and then have breakfast. I had vegetable chow mein for about 65 cents… I learned that we can import a lot of things, but I was not able to find fiberglass fabric.
Friday, April 28, 2023
I left immediately after yoga to Bikram’s shop. We had a quick meeting with Satish from RERL, who asked me to help them optimize the “90 C low power, load shifting water heater”… I immediately offered that the height to diameter ratio was higher than thermally optimal (in minimizing the surface area / volume ratio), and that there should be insulation under the heater…. I surprised myself that I’d been thinking about those things, but never offered them because I didn’t want to seem rude. I told them that. Satish responded that I am an expert in this because this is what I’ve been doing for many years…. wow, I reflected, I guess I am!
When we got back to Bikram’s workshop and in some downtime, I made an Excel model to calculate the surface area to volume ratio as a function of the ratio of Diameter/Height. The minimum surface area happens when D = H, but we see that the curve is so flat on the bottom that there is really no price to pay, thermally or in cost of materials as long as 0.5 < D/H < 2. We measured the containers, and I was shocked to see that D = 30 cm and H = 36 cm… It wasn’t as tall and skinny as either of us thought… when I told Bikram, he had to grab a tape measure to check it himself.
Next we plugged in the demonstration water heater and noted that the bottom was hot… like too hot to touch, especially in the middle. I asked that we open one of them up and noticed that there’s no insulation under the pot, and the heater is pressed into place by a steel bolt threaded through a steel cross piece, creating thermal contact between the heater and the outer steel shell. We removed the bolts and instead stuffed rockwool between the heater and the steel cross piece. We filled the bottom of the chamber with rockwool and put the two heaters side by side. We ran out of time, but preliminary results support using rockwool. The conditions in the shop are punishing. Incredibly loud as one worker hammers metal, welding and metal grinding in many places, flying sparks. Buddhists make use of rotating cylinders, prayer wheels or mani wheels… like on the perimeter of the Boudha Stupa. As people walk the Stupa perimeter, they push and rotate the cylinders. There are also smaller, hand-held rotating cylinders. The shop is making some enormous rotating cylinders for a temple (below, right).
Bikram was very busy doing many other tasks during the day, allowing me more than enough time to do the calculations I wanted to do… but the work got done very quickly…. because we didn’t do any of it. For instance, we measured where the slits in the aluminium pot should be, and Bikram called over one of his workers, BAM, finished. We contemplated how to make the rim of the prototype’s “hat”. For, 2400 NRs (~ $36) Bikram can get 0.5 mm stainless steel sheets, 4′ x 8′ – enough for eight cookers… Wow! having a stainless surface is certainly worth $4.50.
Above, notice from left (cook pot in heated nest), upside down pot in SS rim with protruding heater electrodes, Bikram directing the cutting of the SS sheet, assembling the prototype, and workings grinding down the cut edges. When the edges of the stainless steel surface are screwed to the rigid aluminium pot rim, the thin stainless steel provides enough support for the cooking unit to not need any additional support from beneath. The electric heating element (right, imported from China for about $6) is pushed upward by the underlying steel mesh, resulting in good thermal contact with the bottom of the cookpot.
I had dinner with Bikram’s family, and played piano with his daughter. It was fun to be with a family again… first time since December, Togo, with Salma’s family.
Friday, April 29, 2023
I feel crappy again. I was going to go on a hike with Coco, but I stayed home and napped and worked on the computer. It rained pretty long and hard this afternoon. Maybe this is the beginning of monsoons?
Sunday, April 30, 2023
Super great day. I want to say that this is the best ISECooker I’ve ever made, but I didn’t make it, THEY did. I just worked on my computer and two guys would come into the office periodically to show me what they’d done and I’d do my best to communicate with words, hands and drawings what to do next.
Yoga was cut short, interrupted after a half hour by the arrival of an esteemed monk, who spoke on a microphone in Nepalese. After 15 minutes, I motioned to Santoshee (our teacher) and left. The motor taxi was chatty during the ride, motioning with (only a single) hand as he spoke. I asked if he liked driving the motorcycle. He said, “No, but I need the money”. I asked what he likes to do. He likes playing guitar. So, I got his phone number and am looking forward to learning with him.
Bikram and I decided to power the ISECooker prototype with the same 300 W heater and control system they have in the water heaters… because they are already there and work. Thus, this prototype will be for gird access, and we’ll make the next one for solar panels. We found a ceramic heater (above, second from left) that is made in Bhaktapur by Digu Bhairav Ceramics for about 1/5 the cost of buying the electrical heating elements imported from China. I look forward to meeting with this local company. Unfortunately, the temperature controller Bikram gets for about $4.00 only runs up to 110 C, so we buried the temperature sensor in the rock wool insulation, roughly half way between the cooking assembly and the outer shell. Thus, when the controller cuts off the power to the heater at 110C, the cooker itself should be close to 200 C. To be determined.
They made nice handles by inserting the steel cable into the rim of the aluminium cook pot and crushed the rim on both sides. Right, ISECooker with insulated cap. We are having difficulty getting the Teflon fabric to stick to the plastic wash basin. The stray dogs, everywhere in Nepal, are relaxed and friendly – mostly sleep all day in the street and (it seems) bark all night. They are fed rice or whatever every evening so they don’t starve. They are nice to people, and rarely beg for food. I wonder if the beggars on the street are fed daily.
Monday, May 1, 2023
May day is a national holiday. I feel crappy again and spent most of the day in bed and working on my computer…. I played the guitar for an hour. I imagine I’m getting better.
Tuesday, May 2, 2023
I found Santoshi’s yoga studio on the perimeter of the Boudha Stupa, above the Himalayan Coffee Shop. Then I took a motorcycle back to Bikram’s shop. We finished the insulated top for the ISECooker prototype and tested it. I glued Teflon cloth to the rim of the plastic wash basin with RTV silicone gasket maker. During the test, the Teflon cloth peeled away from the plastic. The RTV seal between the heated nest and SS surface also failed. It’s hard to know if this is bad RTV glue, if I didn’t give it enough time to fully cure, or if RTV glue just isn’t appropriate for these metal surfaces.
We also discovered considerable condensation on the underside of the SS surface indicating that lots of water vapor comes into the insulation through the slits in the nest. We will meet with the aluminium pot makers to design a cook pot / nest shape with a flat, tapered wall that would allow two pots to be nested with good thermal contact. At right, the temperature of the nest is 290 C while the water temperature is 89 C while heating at 300 W, indicating a temperature difference between the nest and food to be 50 C per 100 W of power. The 44.5 C reading of the controller is from the temperature sensor glued to the underside of the SS surface, about half way between the nest/cook pot and outer rim.
I had dinner and spent the night at Bikram’s house. It was so nice to be with a family and hear the piano being practiced.
Wednesday, May 3, 2023
In the morning, Bikram and I return to Pranish’s aluminium pot shop to tell him to come see our cooker. While they were talking, I went into the shop. It’s amazing how two guys with a spinning shaft, a metal bar, and two branches can spin a pot from 17 gauge (~ 1.2 mm) aluminium in 4 minutes. We see a couple things from the video:
1) the rim of the pot is determined by the craftsman, so with the same die, we can make different rims… this is important because we want to have the same shape for the nest and cook pot, but the nest should have a flat rim, and the cook pot will have a round rim, so we can insert the steel cable for handles.
2) The craftsman also determines the height of the pot. So, the nest can be taller than the cook pot, allowing the cook pot rim to be (almost) flush with the cooking surface.
3) Producing pots with a different shape requires a new die to be cut… in India. It’s expensive, but takes time. HOWEVER, we can make one out of wood to experiment with prototypes.
Thursday, May 4, 2023
Felt crappy again. It rained almost all day. I did my laundry. In my post nap haze, hanging my clothes up in the cold and damp, I upended the vessel that the Buddhist monks burn incense in during their pugas, dumping ashes all over our patio… not knowing if the ashes were sacred… scooped most of it back into the vessel and swept up the rest, put it in the garbage and shook it down so it didn’t show from the top.
Friday, May 5, 2023
Santoshi said it’s like this every full moon, but Aavash says that it’s the Buddha’s birthday today… but the people were THICK down by the Boudha Stupa. I found it easier to walk 3/4 the way around the Stupa clockwise from above (or in the downward vector direction) with all the people rather than trying to swim upstream only 1/4 of the way around the circle. She allows us to interrupt class to watch when the drummers went by.
After yoga, I got a motorcycle ride to Hari’s ceramic heater shop, Digu Bhairav Ceramics. It was a wonderful ride on roads that were not too crowded. Wearing my bicycle helmet and grabbing the motorcycle seat helped create an illusion of safety as we flew over the countryside and I took video. From left: I enter Hari’s neighborhood… they all make ceramics with a few kilns (private and to share), a young boy asks me where I’m from and I show him a picture of Hari. He says “that’s my big father!” (in Fiji, it means your father’s older brother). A stack of Hari’s electric grills ready to go, the array of ceramic heaters: 500 W, 750 W (missing), 1000 W, 1500 W, 2000 W, the die for heater, NiCr wire for the 500 W heater.
After my meeting with Hari, I walked down to the main road to catch a motorcycle home… every 5 steps there was a shrine worth taking a picture… they also built a number of large, square pools for beauty… not recreation.
Evening. I’m in a swanky hotel on the top floor seeing the mountains (Bikram corrects me: “hills, you can’t see the mountains behind) on all sides because the two days of constant rain have washed the sky. Aavash plays guitar and belts out song… I met him last night playing at the Arya and suggested we get together to play guitar and piano. He’s great…it’s perfect… except I’m the only one here. There just isn’t the money to support the arts… or night life?… here.
9:44 PM, there’s more people here now, a table of business-looking-men next to me with a hooka…and Aavash is nicely rocking the place. Coco’s out to a meditation retreat, leaving me and Kiki missing her… so Kiki came out to join us. It turns out that before translating ancient Tibetan scripture, Kiki made music videos with the Bhutanese film industry.
Sunday, May 7, 2023
I took a motorcycle back to Lalitpur with the heater parts Hari sold me. I was able to make the low-resistance low-temperature electrodes on the NiCr wire… but it was way harder to do than Haubtom made it look in this video I took of him. I destroyed many coils in the process… But, in the end I think I got the electrode I wanted.
Tuesday, May 9, 2023
I don’t remember much about what I did yesterday. I slept a lot. I was sick again… Oh, yes, I read about gastritis. It was the tea. No more morning tea for me… Just yogurt, bananas, eggs… no chili peppers. I feel much better today on my new diet. I’ll just have to manage my minor morning tea addiction.
I arrived in Bhaktapur early enough to have breakfast in a one-room stall right on the road… wife and baby of the owner there. Hari, his daughter, Rajeshwori, and baby… I remembered to get our picture this time. I bought all the resistive coils I think I’ll need to make heaters for the different ISECookers.
On the way home, I visited a major department store and bought two plastic buckets for an ISECooker outer shell, for 1,700 NRs, about $14… But it turns out that we can likely get aluminium pots cheaper… now that I know Pranish, he can make the aluminium of thinner (cheaper) aluminium because the ISECooker has way less mass than if the pots were full of food.
Wednesday, May 10, 2023
I took the plastic stuff to Patan, requiring a car taxi. There are main roads, but the Taxis usually take back alleys. Maybe this is because the main roads are congested, but it was early morning, and this driver took the alleys. We stopped at one point due to a festival roadblock, so I got out and walked… it was pretty cool.
There’s so much going on in the NYSE factory… see the video, first, cutting metal pieces, then aligning the microhydro generator assembly, welding, and grinding on the many improved cook stoves.
I heated 4 kg of water with the ~ 1.1 kW heater I’d made, and turned it off when the water temperature approached 90 C. I don’t boil the water because it will produce a lot of condensate everywhere… something we need to manage. We see about a 200 C difference in temperature between the nest and water by the time I turn it off, corresponding to about 0.2 C/W of heating… although the temperature difference continues to rise, so ultimately the temperature difference would have increased, had I allowed the water to boil. From the cooling curve, we can calculate the heat loss rate to be about 0.2 W/C, meaning you lose bout 0.2 Watts for every degree difference in temperature between the cook pot and outside temperature. So, if you had a thermal mass inside at 420 C, the heat loss rate would be about 80 W.
In the afternoon, I met with Pranish. I am excited to see that he is actively innovating with us. He made two specialty pots that fit nicely inside each other with enough room in between for the heater. We were able to fit the pots together where the cook pot was resting on the heater, and the walls of the pots were “touching” but not pressed together. The pots not locked together facilitates cook pot removal, but might give less of a thermal connection between the cook pot and nest… resulting in a higher nest temperature, meaning increased heat loss. However, the measurement I took afterwards indicates the opposite: by resting on top of the heater, the cook pot draws slightly more heat than it does from locking the two pots together, resulting in a maximum nest temperature of 270 C… about 13 C less than when the pots were locked together with the cook pot not touching the heater. It’s not much of a difference, but it means we don’t nee to lock the pots together.
Thursday, May 11, 2023
There’s a group of hardware stores on the way to Patan. I realized I can’t do the work I need to do on the heaters without better pliers, so I stopped on the way… nothing opens until about 10:30 AM, so I had breakfast while I waited. Using the new tools, I managed to make a good NiCr electrode for the heater coil. However, I was not able to twist an electrode for the very thin (high resistivity) wire necessary for a low power heater using grid electricity.
In the evening, I decided to move to Patan. Bikram took me to a nice place he researched, 10 minutes walk from the factory, and I made a deposit. Bikram left me in the nearby Patan Durbar Square and I walked a good hour north homeward before getting a motorcycle taxi home. I liked the atmosphere so much, I decided to move in the next day. I’ll practice yoga alone OK now, although I’ll miss Santoshi.
Friday, May 12, 2023
I moved into my new place in Patan midday and went to the factory. I was finally able to make an electrode on the low power, thin heater coil by making an electrode with slightly thicker wire winding through one layer of thin wire. At right are two 200 W heaters: One that is 8 Ohms for the ~ 36 V output of two (100 W) solar panels in series, and one is 250 Ohms for (~ 220 V) line voltage.
Saturday, May 13, 2023
I like Patan. Although there is more activity here, it seems more peaceful than Bouddha. So far no one has asked me for money, where there are are many beggars in Bouddha. Although I miss the view from my door in Bouddha, enjoy the rooftop restaurants overlooking Durbar.
I had lunch on the other side of Durbar Square… it was a late late lunch. You can see the sun setting in the last picture:
Sunday, May 14, 2023
The gastritis isn’t done with me yet… feeling beaten up today, but I came to Bikram’s factory. I ran an experiment on the high resistance (thin wire) heater I made Friday. Temperature measurements indicate the heater produced about 215 W, but is likely slightly higher because I didn’t consider the mass of the ceramic heater and heat lost… which might have been as high as 22 W = (136 C – 23C)*0.2 W/C. What’s nice is that the nest did not get too much hotter than the water – only about 40 C hotter… for 215 W, indicates a temperature difference of 0.2 C/ W of heating power.
I had dinner on another 6th floor restaurant, the Momo Kings. While I was up there, the sky opened up.
Monday, May 15, 2023
I worked on the ISECooker and put a hinge on the lid so you can open it and add contents or stir. I met Jiwan after work and had really a lovely walk to get there.
Below, sculptured support for the temple overhang.
Tuesday, May 16, 2023
I cooked my first meal today at NYSE on our ISECooker, met virtually with Simon and Jane, AND in the afternoon, we had a meeting of all the stakeholders. I shopped for chicken legs and vegetables on the way to work. The butcher asked if I wanted the chicken torched… and he did. The chanterelles were about 40 cent a pound. They friend up nicely… then I added the chicken and other vegetables. Notice the temperature evolution. The temperature of the food drops each time I open the ISECooker and add more food. My mother asked, “why do you cook the mushrooms the longest? I fry them first, take them out, cook the rest of the food, and add them back at the end.”…that’s what I’ll do next time!
Below, from left are: Biraj (PEEDA), Shree Raj (ME professor, card to the right), me, Bikram (NYSE), Jiwan (RERL), Subas Kunwar (RERL), and Satish (RERL) are standing around our 12.5 kg prototype.
They enthusiastically discussed the ISECooker in Nepalese for almost an hour and then explained that this was exactly what is needed in rural areas… with thermal storage.
Presently Nepal has all the clean electricity it can use However, if they are to electrify cooking, the grid will not be able to handle the morning load surge. Thus, the government is providing low power (300 W) devices that store energy. Presently Nepal Yantrashala Energy (the industrial partner) is producing a 300 W, 20 L water heater that heats water to 80 C overnight to be used for morning cooking. We plan to manufacture an ISECooker to heat an aluminium thermal storage (between 5 and 10 kg) to up to 500 C to provide high performance cooking (many kW) any time of the day while drawing 200 W – 300 W from the grid…. It should cost less than $50.
In the high Himalayans there is no grid, limited biomass, and limited road access. They fly in LPG… it’s very expensive. We are planning a 300 W ISECooker with solar panels and aluminium thermal storage… for about $200.
Wednesday, May 17, 2023
I went back to PEEDA today to meet with Biraj. I started walking, planning to get a motorcycle taxi, but stopped along the way to buy a bike for about $45. It felt so good to ride again. Biraj agreed to let me do experiments comparing ISECooking to induction cooking at PEEDA where they have all the necessary apparatus… in a shed that needs to be organized first. Afterwards, I visited the hospital… I’ve had it with this gastritis. I was in there less than a half hour and it cost me about $15. The doctor made short work of me. He had this picture of a stomach bacteria under the glass on his desk that looks like a cucumber with tendrils coming from one end. He prescribed an antibiotic and something else (an antacid?). I’m to eat bland food… plain rice and dahl. No hot peppers, fried food, or heavy meats. I felt better before the day was over… Damn what a relief. They say patience is a virtue, but I shouldn’t have been so patient with my stomach for the last three weeks.
Thursday, May 18, 2023
Don’t remember…. I guess I spent the day planning and working. But today marks one month I’ve been in Nepal. As the webpage gets kind of big after a month, I will archive this and start a new page.