A surprise, yet scheduled, power cut today. For infrastructure maintenance, we’re told. That’s good. Some places don’t get their electricity infrastructure maintained. Like the rest of South Africa, for example.
Ostensibly, we’re off for a whole 14 hours. Without warning, nogal.
Well, apparently, there was a warning, but we weren’t told about it. And that’s one of the fundamental things about warnings. If you don’t get them, then you are very much unwarned.
And so we are quite literally without electricity, without warning.
It’s like getting loadshedding back, which might be good training for next week when everyone thinks we’ll be getting loadshedding back…
An aside for foreign readers: next week is election week here, and it’s widely believed that loadshedding has been done away with for the last 7 weeks in the hope that the voting public will conveniently forget that the current (no pun intended) ruling party can’t even supply the most basic of services. Quite whether this is true or not is up for debate, but it’s an entirely reasonable suggestion. Quite how the electricity grid is being propped up is also a bit of a mystery, but it seems like it’s billions of Rands worth of diesel, some sticky tape, and prayers to several (or more) deities. It’s also completely unsustainable. And furthermore, it’s pointless after the polling stations close on Wednesday evening. Hence the widespread belief that we’ll be back to Stage n very shortly.
But I digress. Often.
The council have also chosen the darkest, most miserable day to do the work. Thick black clouds, a cold Westerly breeze, drizzle. If this was Sheffield, I’d look at those clouds and fully expect snow. That’s unlikely to happen though. Still, not only will this inclement weather slow the workers down, it’s also preventing our little home solar setup from helping out with the power situation. We’re only a month away from the winter solstice, and so even if we could see the sun – which is some 151½ million kilometers away anyway – it would only be up for 10 hours and would only drag itself to 35o above the horizon.
I’m not an expert on solar power, but we need is closer, higher sun, for longer.
If we’d had some warning (which we didn’t – see above), then I could have pumped up the batteries and lived a near normal life. Instead, we’ve been in deficit since we woke up, and despite my best power-saving efforts, I’m helplessly watching what’s left slowly, inexorably slip away.
I might be tempted to rig up some sort of system so that as the batteries give up completely, they give a comedic beep…beep…beeeeeeeeeeep noise like one might hear in rather less comedic circumstances in a hospital ICU.
But then again, I suppose that that would only use more power. Which we don’t have. Because of the power cut.
On the plus side, there has been a delicious lack of angle-grinding and jack-hammery from the nearby building site. This is not going to assist with my waning electricity issues, but it has made it a whole lot quieter while the power runs out.
And it’s clearly the little wins that I’m going to have to focus on today.
I’m powerless to do anything else.
