Solar Water Pumping

Borehole, surface and irrigation pumping powered directly from solar, for farms, institutions and off-grid sites across Kenya.

Why pumping suits solar particularly well

Most solar systems need batteries because demand and generation do not coincide. Pumping does not have that problem: you can run the pump when the sun is up and store the output as water in a tank. Storage in a tank is dramatically cheaper per unit than storage in a battery, and a tank does not degrade with cycling. For a great many agricultural sites this makes solar pumping the cheapest form of solar there is.

What sizing depends on

Two numbers govern everything: total head and daily volume. Total head is the vertical lift from water level to discharge point plus friction losses in the pipework, and friction losses are not a rounding error over a long run of narrow pipe. Daily volume is what the crop, the herd or the institution actually needs, seasonally adjusted.

Given those two figures, the hydraulic work required per day follows, and from that the array size at local peak sun hours. Without them, any pump recommendation is a guess — which is why we ask for borehole test records, standing and pumping water levels and the pipe schedule before quoting.

Direct-drive against battery-backed

A direct-drive system runs the pump straight from the array through a suitable controller, ramping with the sun. It is simpler, cheaper and has less to fail. A battery-backed system can pump at a fixed rate regardless of cloud and can pump outside daylight, at the cost of the battery and its replacement cycle. Where a tank can be built, direct drive is usually the better engineering answer.

What we supply

Pump and controller selection, array sizing and mounting, cabling and protection, tank and float control integration, installation and commissioning. Systems are quoted from the borehole and site data rather than from a catalogue.

Questions