Imilender's tour in Sub-saharan africa

It's interesting how dependand we are on electricity. Everything nowdays runs on electricity from computers to cleaning utilities. And if power is out, the whole economy pretty much stops working. South Africa is currently faced with a situation that the demand for electicity is higher than the production capacity and therefore the national electicity supplier, Eskom, has had to resort to load shedding. The current power shortage is 2000MW.

Load shedding basically means that they intentionally cut of certain parts of the power distribution network to reduce comsumption. These black outs are scheduled and informed on the eskom website. The scheduled blackouts are always for two hours and the schedule depends on the level of shortfall that the network is experiencing.

These blackouts affect day-to-day life in various means. Larger offices are often fitted with own generators or batteries & inverters to power up the computers and internet connections during a blackout. However not all. For example we were in a bank on monday trying to setup internet access for our accounts when a powercut hit, and the entire bank was closed, as was the entire mall in which the bank was in. The traffic lights will of course also switch themselves off during the blackout. However this country is so used to blackout that traffic flows suprisingly well through the intersection anyhow. They even have a rule on how to behave in an intersection if the traffic lights are off. That intersection is treated as a fourway stop and the one who stopped first, will go first. Basically meaning that there will always get one car from each side street out at turn.

Well now we need to decide how we'll handle our own blackouts. Shall we install an inverter or a generator...