Hi Everyone!

So sorry it has been so long since our last post! These past two months have been very exciting and busy for LuminAID Lab. We are incredibly grateful for the IndieGoGo campaign and the community of supporters that helped us launch the LuminAID light!

We shipped over 1,500 LuminAID lights a few weeks ago to IndieGoGo supporters in over 25 countries. We were thrilled to hear how happy so many people were with the product and have received a lot of great feedback. If you received a light from the campaign, we encourage you to e-mail us your comments at info@luminAIDlab.com. We value your input!

We’ve sent a few hundred lights to partner organizations thus far and will be sending the remaining matched lights in the weeks ahead. We hope to collect pictures and video of the lights in use and profile the different organizations in the blog.

Below is the growing list of organizations receiving LuminAID lights: (a huge thanks to these organizations for helping us distribute the matched lights)

Indigenous Education Foundation of Tanzania, Tanzania

Solar Sister, Uganda

Uboshobozi, Rwanda

Elephant Energy, Namibia

Ponheary Ly Foundation, Cambodia

Pencils of Promise’s Xongja, Na Mai, and Phayong Primary Schools, Laos

Room to Grow Foundation, Thailand

Anekal Orphanage in Bangalore, India

Aloysian Boys Home in Mangalore, India

Center for Unfolding Learning Potentials in Jaipur, India

EcoSolutions NGO in Mumbai, India

Can-Do, Haiti

Image of the LuminAID light in the Aloysian Boys home outside of Mangalore, India

We are setting up our online retail site so people will be able to purchase lights for personal use and donate lights to partner organizations. We’re finalizing packaging designs and further improving on a few details of the product. The retail portion of the site should be up and running shortly. Stay tuned!

Thanks again for your support of the product and mission! We’re really looking forward to the steps ahead.

Thank you to everyone who contributed to our “Give Light, Get Light” campaign on IndieGoGo and helped us launch the LuminAID light! Please find below the Holiday Tribute card options. You can print out and give it to the  person in whose honor you contributed to the campaign. Each card is 5″ x 7″.  Thank you Hillary Cribben for your help designing these beautiful cards!

LuminAID Lab is excited to announce the launch of our “Give Light, Get Light” campaign on IndieGoGo. 

Here’s the link: http://www.indiegogo.com/luminaid

It is a 40 day campaign where you can pledge LuminAID lights to our community projects and we will send you a LuminAID light to say thank you! There are other great packages that you can give in honor of friends or families for the holidays and we will send you a tribute card to share with them.

We have been gearing up for this for a few months and are so excited to start production and distribute LuminAID lights to you and to our community projects in January 2012. We’ll keep you posted on progress! Be one of the first 50 to contribute and we’ll give you a special shout-out on our facebook page!

Thanks for making this world a little brighter!

LuminAID Lab

LuminAID Lab has received a lot of great feedback on how to improve the product and we’re excited to share all the improvements. The plastic is more durable , the  LEDs last longer and are even brighter, and the press-buttons make the light simple and easy to use.

We have a lot of great things coming up in the next few weeks and look forward to sending more updates!

Made a new video explaining the project! A kickstarter video is also in the works. We are excited to get people to sponsor lights! Stay tuned for updates!

Some of you may have heard us talk for some time now about finding a new name for our product. We are excited to announce that we are renaming both our product and our company. The Solar Light Pillow Project will now be known as LuminAID Lab, and our light is now the LuminAID solar light!  Our new name came to us with help from our talented friends Stevie Belchak and Jess Tom. While we are sad to retire the well-liked “light pillow” nickname, we felt the change was necessary in order to better market our product. We consider it one more of the many lessons learned so far in having started our venture. There are many new exciting developments to come, so be sure to join our mailing list to keep up to date!

Earlier this week we stayed at a coffee estate in Chikmagalur. Chikmagalur is a town located about 5 hours from Bangalore and is known for its coffee and tea estates. The town is set within the foothills of the Western Ghats and the estates are all located along narrow, winding roads up in the hills. The estate was beautiful and a nice break from the city. There were around 40 workers on the coffee estate, 3 writers (who are in charge of the workers), and the owners. It was nice to see what life would be like living up there.

During the rainy season, the estates frequently lose electricity. We had electricity for a few hours each night and it was mostly off during the day. We gave the cook on the estate a light pillow to help him with his work. He had a small, kerosene lamp that he was using.

We also used the light for our evening activities. It was really handy to have around and we were all very happy with the amount of light it gave off.

Yesterday we visited a village called Anekal. It is about an hour outside of the city of Bangalore. We went to St. Joseph’s Pre-University College and talked to a few classrooms about how solar light works and about the light pillow. It was great to see how excited kids were about the light. They poked at it and examined the solar panel closely.

The school is run by the Anekal Jesuit Mission in the village. They have a few hundred students coming from all around the area- some traveling quite a distance by bus. The teacher polled the students how many were the first ones in their families to go to school and nearly all of them raised their hand. All of the kids at the school are Dalits. We were given a good lesson in the caste system and how Dalits are outcasts, the very lowest, excluded from the caste system entirely. Later on in the day, we were able to visit where a lot of the kids from the school live.

We visited two hostels here, also run by the Jesuit mission. Many of the kids who live in the hostels are without parents. One of the hostels had about 20 kids living in it. It had one, large room with a group of desks pushed to the side and a small TV. The kids were all at school when we visited. The other hostel was for boys and it was quite a bit larger. It had separate rooms where groups of kids could sleep and a few classrooms and dining rooms. We were told that the kids come home from school around 4 pm – 5 pm, study for 2 hours before dinner, 1 hour after dinner, and 1 hour in the morning before leaving for school. Electricity is not reliable in the evening and this makes it difficult for the kids to keep up with their studies. We look forward to staying connected to the hostels and sending lights there for the kids to use to study.

Below is the entrance to the smaller of the two hostels.

Below is the village where the hostels are located.

Andrea’s father gave a cow to Krishnappa’s family a few years ago for him to make money selling the milk. The cow was out for the day to graze in the pasture, but its calf was around for us to visit. Krishnappa was really kind and we learned that his daughter goes to the Pre-University school that we had visited earlier in the day.

Krishnappa’s home was very dark even in the late-afternoon. We tested out a light inside and described to him how it works. Some people in the village do have what they refer to as “current”, or electricity, but it is unreliable. People were really excited about being able to save on current and have an extra, inexpensive light.

Today we had a meeting at SELCO’s head office in Bangalore. SELCO’s main focus is on installing solar lighting systems in rural homes in India; however, they also install solar lighting systems in schools and businesses. A typical system includes a solar panel on the roof, a rechargeable battery, and a few CFL or LED lights installed inside and sometimes outside the house. The homeowner switches on and off the individual lights with switches on the wall the same way we do. SELCO has provided nearly 150,000 homes in India with these systems. Families typically take out loans to pay for the systems and repay the bank over a period of 3-5 years.

The individual we spoke to, Ananth, explained that SELCO has over 27 branches that install the systems and provide technical/repair services. Each branch generally has a manager and two technicians. The distributed branches give SELCO the ability to quickly repair the systems and make support more accessible. The individuals who purchase these systems generally have an income of a few thousand rupees a year. Many make much less than this and SELCO is working on alternative models to address the lower income bracket. One alternative model is a central, solar-powered, charging station in a  village where people purchase an individual light and pay a small fee to charge it each day from a shared solar panel – functioning similar to a gas station.

Ananth said that they have worked slowly and steadily to reach the number of people that they have. He had a lot of good feedback for us and advice on moving forward. Many of their customers need an additional light or lantern that is not connected to the main system to keep on for longer hours as a nightlight, outdoor light, or light for where their animals are sleeping. He said fishermen are also in need of portable lights for their boats. And for the many people who cannot afford the payments of a whole system, or who do not have a house to install the system in, portable, rechargeable lights are a good option. Most important is to get the cost very low, the brightness and quality as high as we can get it, and to get the product out there. After that, we will learn much more about how and where the product is most useful.

Below is Selco’s head office in Bangalore.

Below is an image of the interior lights in one of Selco’s home systems (from their website):