Designing and Implementing Field Testing for Solar Water Pumps
Practical guidance on monitoring solar water pump performance and efficiency in the field.
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Efficiency for Access is developing resources to help practitioners design and implement field testing projects. The resources focus on performance monitoring and measurement of appliances and equipment designed for use in off-grid and weak-grid contexts.
Successful field testing provides information about a product’s performance, the user experience and its impacts on their livelihoods. In addition, the data and intelligence gathered from field testing inform decisions about design, financing, business models and more.
The guide provides specific design and implementation considerations for solar water pumps, including templates for data collection, recommendations for defining and measuring technical parameters and other customisable resources. We drew the learnings and examples from our team’s experience monitoring solar water pump performance in Kenya, Tanzania, and Senegal.
This document complements an appliance agnostic field-testing guide published in January 2022, entitled Practical Guidance for Designing and Implementing Field Testing for Appliances & Productive Use Equipment. This SWP guide is further complemented by learnings from beta testing of remote monitoring equipment which were shared in the Evaluating Appliance Performance in the Field: Results from Remote Monitoring Solutions Beta Testing report. We recommend that the solar water pump field testing guide is read together with the appliance agnostic guide for a holistic view of field testing. Guidance on field testing of off-grid refrigerators is also available here.