Electrical outages are very common place in the summer here in Buenos Aires. I'm usually pretty prepared in that way because I have three electric vehicles, two unicycles and an electric motorcycle.
They serve to charge phones, computers, tablets and the like on end for long periods of time.
But, as you can see in this photo, the electric unicycle that I use was at the end of its charge cycle. I let them run down quite a bit before I charge them in order to cycle the battery. So I started this power outage with 16% battery left in my wheel.
It has two charging ports that I can use even while I'm riding around the city, a regular USB and a USB C port.
I'm usually really good about plugging in my devices at night before going to sleep, but that wasn't the case last night. Another way I had gotten caught with my pants down was that my son has his electric unicycle taking apart, waiting for parts to come in from China, and he's using my spare. He's currently at work about an hour away.
So I am here trying to charge my phone and my laptop with a wheel that has only 16% battery. I will likely be able to charge both of them to full without draining this battery because they are really powerful batteries.
But if this is an extended outage, which some of them are, I won't last two days without having to go somewhere to charge my devices.
My kids didn't grow up with their faces glued to phones, but they did get their phones around age 12 or so. Since then they sleep with their phones next to them and my oldest usually has video chat going with his girlfriend and they both fall asleep with the video chat going, crazy!
That kind of thing is not so good for your charging cord, and I had to go searching for both kinds of charging cords before I could attempt to recharge my devices. There are plenty of USB-C to USB-C cables in the house but the regular ones are hard to find. Look at the wear and tear on his USB-C cable.
As I write this, you can see that my phone had not been charged last night.
Also, there is no water when the power goes out so the house has one or two good showers left after power outage and that depends on if the neighbors in the building are trying to get there last showers in before the water runs out, just in case this ends up being an extended outage.
It's a little bit like where I grew up, we had a well which used to pump underground that would pressurize a tank in the basement and, if the power went out your pressure would fade pretty fast unless that pump comes back on. Here, the same is true for the entire city because there is no pressure in the water lines throughout the whole town, or in this case city. It's like that everywhere, not just Buenos Aires.
Every building has to pump water out of the city water lines and up to a tank on the roof of every apartment building. Once that tank runs dry, there's no water in the entire building until the electricity goes back on.
I believe one day the governments of the world will allow the infrastructure to get so bad that extended power outages will be the norm. That is the case already in this city, based on the fact that every bank and many companies have generators parked out in front of their buildings 24/7, all year round. There is one such company, I believe it's a radio station, half a block away and as soon as my phone reaches 30%, I will take a walk over there and add a picture of that generator to this post before I post it.
And, they're digging up the entire sidewalk to find the short circuit or whatever is that my causing this....
This too will pass, until the above inevitably comes to pass. This is just what's been on my mind the last few hours. Does anyone know a good solar panel guy?
