ETA came through an hour ago that electricity planned maintenance is delayed and connection will happen between 9 and 10pm this evening. This is 5 or 6 hours later than planned which wrecks your entire day.
This morning the sound of generators is humming around the neighborhood as we have two days of planned electricity maintenance on the various substations. My daughters family has moved in for two days because with young ones you need hot water for baths and showers. The all important internet and tv so I don't blame her because why struggle when you have us nearby. All I can say is we are lucky we installed solar and decided to move away from this unreliable grid..
These planned maintenance outages are fairly common and can recall a few that happened 8-12 months ago. One has to ask why because this is not normal to have these so regularly unless there is a problem they have been hiding and knowing these substations are going to blow up if not for these bush fixes. This is what I presume is going on and these are all temporary fixes until the next planned maintenance event in 6 months time.
We are obviously not affected because we have solar and would not even know besides the tractor like sounding generators up and down the street. I went to the shops this morning, but not the ones around the corner and needed to drive outside of the affected area to buy fresh bread rolls as the ovens would not be working. You do not realize how these power outages have a direct impact on businesses until you need to go and buy certain things and they are not available. A back up generator will provide for lighting and basic needs, but bread ovens there is no chance as the power required is just not possible.
Whilst writing the post my son's buddies have just arrived so it looks like a full house for today and most likely tomorrow and why I went and bought extra food items to cater for who knows how many people. In the past we have had 25 people here during the weekend as no one wants no power and they all know we have it.
Todays planned power outage is from 8am -4pm and the same again tomorrow so 16 hours in total and most will not run a generator for that long and is only used for a few hours. I would guess with todays prices this would be around R600-R700 as a cost on fuel for that time period thinking back to how long a full tank lasted which is about 6 hours.
We live in another world in South Africa
It could be worse though as imagine being without power for 4 days and not having a response. This lady has now got 2 different reference numbers because they would have closed the first reference number sating it was fixed to hide the fact nothing had been done. This is what they do and is actually a common way to show how efficient they are lol.
These are not isolated incidents and there are so many who have had no power for multiple days and I just cannot contemplate how people are living putting up with this level of non service.
What the power companies are doing is deflecting the blame to cable theft thus blaming the non service of the law enforcement which is also a problem. There is an average of 60 cable theft incidents daily and why there should be a ban on scrap mental until this is resolved. Places like Kenya managed to overcome this so why not South Africa unless the officials are all part of the problem which is highly likely. Just this week one of the top security officials was implicated in the illicit tobacco trade and is another investigation taking place.
