I wish in lived in Peru.
...until you need quality goods and services
I admire the project you guys are undertaking- I think people often overestimate the level of infrastructure many of these places have, and how that affects the lifestyle- Peru is a beautiful place to visit
Thanks. Your comment is also dead on. Even though I was already pretty familiar with society here, I was still caught off guard in many ways when doing this project. When you hire someone here for anything, it is really a roll of the dice. We got thoroughly ripped off by a few people when building our house. In hindsight, I wished a general contractor friend of mine from the USA had been here supervising everything, and negotiating the entire time. I had no construction experience, so sometimes it was hard to know if people were doing things right or not. Considering all that, I would say the house turned out better than we expected. It's just that sometimes you pay for something, and only a couple months after you've paid the person, you realize they didn't do something right, and then it's too late to get your money back. My wife and I learned to never pay someone upfront...ever! And now we're considering how we can withold the second half of someone's payment until 30 days after they complete the job.
We invested a lot of money in our solar equipment here, and quite frankly I just didn't trust anyone from here to do the installation right. I had zero solar experience, but just sat at my computer for months on end researching the topic. I bought my own tools from Amazon and paid double to have them all shipped here. I did the entire installation myself, with the exception of the rooftop work. For that, I stood on a ladder and directed someone else what to do on the roof. It's one of the only aspects of the house that hasn't had even a minor problem.
The most recent problem is that we hired some young "well installers" who came out and didn't really deliver what was promised. They said they were going to make sure we ended up with a clean source of water (or at least clean enough to run through our plumbing and berkey filter for drinking) to supply our house. We don't have proper access out here, so everything either needs to be brought in on your shoulders, horseback, or dragged behind two bulls. Therefore, these guys informed us ahead of time that they wouldn't be able to bring their rig. They said it would still work with a manual drill. So, I only asked one thing, "What happens if you try and don't find water?" The answer was that they would keep trying different places until they found a proper water-source for a well. They wouldn't stop until we acheived the goal. They tried three spots over the course of three days, hit rock in each spot, and therefore couldn't keep going. The third spot had a decent amount of water, but they said the quality was bad with too much sediment.
They wanted to test the quantity of water in that spot, so I said OK, but they wanted to use our Italian-made submersible pump for the test. I said, "I'm not going to loan you my own brand new equipment for you to stick in a spot where you told me the water was too dirty. I'm not going to put my brand new pump at risk. You guys are the pros, you should have your own pump to test these things. Go ahead and test it, and if it's good, then we'll install the pump there along with the plumbing towards the house." They didn't have their own submersible pump, so they decided to abandon that idea. They were giving up. At that point the owner reassured me that they were going to dig a big hole adjacent to the creek, they called it a "keison" well (not sure of the spelling). It was just a big, wide hole that they had us fill gravel that was extremely expensive because for the amount of bulk material hauled to that far end of our property we had to pay for 3 horses for about a week (each carrying two sacks of gravel per trip). Then we bought all the pvc, vulcanized electric cable etc. They tested the whole installation, and the water seemed to be coming out OK.
Then we had a big rain, and the creek level rose to above the level of the whole. The water then came out silty. The owner reassured us that he guarantees his jobs for six months, and all it would need is a "cleaning." Well we're still in the rainy season, so we've never needed to use the pump for our house, because we've been getting enough rain to keep our 1500L tank topped off. They did come out once already, because their plumbing connection had a leak down near the pump. I remember giving them some pointers for how to connect the plumbing, and they quipped back, "yeah, yeah, we studied this stuff in school for our degree." Well sure enough, they had to come out and fix one of their connections that was leaking.
We don't want to have the installation silt up again with another big rain during the rainy season, so we've purposefully been waiting until near the six month mark to have them come do their "cleaning." But in these six months it has dawned on me that they will never be able to provide us with a lasting solution. They simply will not be able to deliver on their original promise. Last time we tested the pump a week ago it only spurted out about 50L of brownish water. Sticking a hose and a pump directly in the creek would've given us much cleaner water then their stupid mud pit hole that we now have. Now when we run the pump, it causes the differencials next to our circuit breakers to trip, thus cutting off the electricity to our house as a protective measure, which means they likely also did a crappy job with the electrical connections on the submersible pump.
We're coordinating for the guy to come out, but based on all my other experiences with the people here, he will not own up to the fact that he's done us wrong, and he will surely refuse to give back any of our money.
Anyway, this is just one example of MANY that we've encountered when dealing with so-called "professionals" in this part of the world. At this point I probably have enough material for a book.
