The battery pack degradation so far seems “normal” as of now since it is early days of the packs; we have not seen any unexpected capacity drops. All the deployed packs are delivering power as expected. Our pilot users liked the combination of a powerful 5W bulb and a mobile charger. The portability due to its light weight and 15+ hours of continuous operation were a major boost to the adoption. Especially in the forest regions during night patrol or while tackling animal intrusion into human habitats at night. Charging process was smooth with adequate sunshine available most parts of the year.

The trade off to have our (good looking) 3D printed casing against e.g. standard ABS plastic boxes proved to be operationally expensive since users often dropped the case, it was too fragile for their usage. Since some of the beneficiaries live in remote locations the telecom network is inconsistent, it caused challenges with data transmission and retrieval. Users are tending to add other loads to the PV system which results in insufficient capacity to charge Nunam devices, especially during the monsoon season.

We will continue studying the degradation patterns of the cell in the device and contribute the learnings to the community. Extrapolate learning into bigger second life packs based of cylindrical cells from other applications such as micro mobility scooters. The key challenge remains on finding ways to reuse cylindrical cells at scale and we hope to work with partners to solve the problem collaboratively.