by: IEEE SIGHT El Salvador

Humanitarian technologies are the best way for engineers to provide benefits to society and with the IEEE SIGHT as a benefactor, the group of young engineers from IEEE SIGHT El Salvador decided to support a community that was challenged by economic issues due to the high cost on their water pump system electrical energy bill.

This problem led the community into a hard decision: to sacrifice Severo Lopez’s training courses at the community house in order to pay the high electrical energy bill.

The SIGHT group applied for IEEE SIGHT funding for a photovoltaic system connected to grid to reduce the energy consumption in the electricity bill for their water pump. With this, they expect the community to use the reduction in the electricity bill savings and therefore to be able to continue with their training courses program.

“As engineers, we felt compromised with providing our knowledge and experience to the community.

In order to develop this sustainable project, we used our August break time, and we all can assure it has been our best invested time ever. It took us one day to transport the equipment and three days to install the solar panels. The system consists of a capacity of 3.9 kWp from eighteen polycrystalline solar modules installed on the roof the community house. We worked three parallel phases: the change of the electric board, the installation of the solar modules and the ground connection. One thousand and six hundred people will be benefited by this project.

This was a really satisfying experience for all those involved, since the community was willing to help the whole time with workforce and hospitality. From this project we gained knowledge, improved technical skills, expanded our network and made bonds with the community.

We encourage engineers, IEEE members, volunteers and anyone willing to help, to implement humanitarian technology projects, we guarantee you a great experience.”