"Then we were talking about water purification systems," she said, "and that's still on the drawing board for the future. ![]() "That just wasn't economical because of the distances they would need to be transported. "At first we were thinking about a way to collect and recycle all the junk cars," Johnson said. No more stopping by the Little America truck stop on the way home from her hairdressing job in Flagstaff: Curtis and her family will be able to take their first showers at home.įunded by the Renewable Energy Investment Fund, a joint project of the Grand Canyon Trust and Springerville Generating Station, the $20,000 unit may hold the answer to the daunting infrastructure needs in the Navajo Nation's most remote and poor communities.Įlsa Johnson of IINA and Mark Snyder of Mark Snyder Electric have been dreaming up ways to help Navajo families since they met in 2008 while working on the "Extreme Makeover: Home Edition" house in Piñon, Ariz. She'll still have to haul water from the windmill down the road, but by dumping it into the system's indoor water tank, Curtis will have pressurized hot and cold water. "I'll put up a 'No Trespassing' sign and camp in there myself." "I'll never get my kids out of there," Curtis said, laughing. On the other end is a small but fully equipped bathroom: composting toilet, shower and sink. The well insulated prefab building houses batteries to store solar energy received during the day for nighttime use. Solar thermal panels on the building will warm water that will run into pipes in the new bathroom, with any residual heat siphoned into a wall-mounted unit inside the existing house.Ī tracking solar panel, meanwhile, will supply two kilowatts of electricity to the house - about half what the average American household uses, but enough for lights and a few small energy-efficient appliances. Her new unit won't completely heat the 300-square-foot hogan her father built, but it will make her wood supply last longer. "I ran out of wood and I didn't want them living in this cold house." "I just put them in the dorm in Winslow," she said. The partners share the ambitious goal of supplying electricity and an indoor bathroom to all 20,000 homes on the Navajo Nation that don't yet have those things.įor Curtis, it may mean that her three children who are still in school can come back and live with her. "It will be very odd and weird," declared the single mother of six last week as workers from a San Diego solar power company delivered the 20-foot-long prefab building that will supply her remote home with both electricity and running water.Ĭurtis is the first beneficiary of the Plateau Solar Project, a partnership between Navajo nonprofit IINA Solutions, Mark Snyder Electric and Global Solar Water Power Systems. Not only that, but the 50-foot dash to the outhouse on a sub-freezing night is a thing of the past. O n Sunday, Paula Curtis was able to flip a switch and light flooded her tiny hogan on the rim of Diablo Canyon.
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