Live better electrically

Most evenings this is what our house looks like.

Anna-Marie headed off for New Zealand on January 9. The next evening the electricity went off — as they say around here “Lights out”.  As in: “Everything in the fridge went bad because the lights were out.” On campus the lights go out occasionally but not usually for very long. Many departments even have backup generators, though Philosophy does not.

Moving off campus put us in a different world. Some neighbourhoods are good with consistent electricity and few brown outs. We don’t live there.

Before we moved into the neighbourhood (long before?) work started on upgrading the electrical grid. New poles have been erected with high-tension wires and every few houses there is a separate transformer. But none of this is connected to the power supply, and at the pace they are going I have little hope we will see it all powered up. It is just too large a neighbourhood, it is too expensive, and there are too few workers.

Since we moved in at the end of September we have probably experienced ‘lights out’ on about a third of the days. Most times this is a few hours in the evening (hopefully, but not always, just after cooking, doing the dishes, and showering). We also experience (twice) daily brown outs, where the lights dim and ceiling fans slooooow down.

This is particularly hard on fridges. When the current drops the motors work harder and quickly burn out. Almost every fridge in Ghana is hooked up to some sort of power protector. This is not a surge protector. When the power drops these devices prevent any power from passing through. That is, they shut off the fridge. Almost every morning and evening our fridge shuts off.

Some times the fridge will be off all day. Cleverly, to preserve some of our food, Anna-Marie filled a pail with water and put it in the freezer. It stays there, and when the power goes out, even for long periods, the cylinder of ice radiates cold even as it melts. So far it has never completely thawed and we have never had to throw out something from the freezer.

We had a fairly good run of ‘lights on’, but on the Tuesday after Anna-Marie’s departure, the lights went out around 7:00pm and didn’t come back on until Wednesday around noon.

That was a long stretch. But for the next ten days the lights went out around 7:00pm and came back between ten and one. This gives me an option. I can sit in the dark outside and get eaten by mosquitoes but have a bit of breeze blow over me. I can sit in the dark inside and hum to myself (and still probably get nibbled on by mosquitoes and have no breeze). I can head to the bed and get under the mosquito net. There I can read by flashlight or try to sleep. I’m good for about an hour of flashlight reading and since the local mosque starts up with the call to prayers around 4:00am, early to bed is very attractive (even with the lights on).

This means lying on the bed, under the net, with no fan on. I woke the other night when the power came back on (I’d missed turning off the radio) in a pool of my own sweat. Well, not really a pool but between two cold, wet sheets. Even with the harmattan, at bedtime it is still about 29 degrees. Later, around two or three, it will drop down to a very refreshing 26. Chai and I have had many pleasant morning walks of late.

But this week things may have changed. On Wednesday, the neighbour across the street came calling with a proposal. Anna-Marie says he is the closest thing we have to the King of Kensington; he does seem to be the spark plug in the neighbourhood improvement committee.

The proposal: For forty cedis per household he can get the electric company to switch our end of the street from one transformer to another; essentially reversing the flow of the electrons down the power lines of our street. We have been connected to an overused transformer at the bottom of our street. But for a little cash the ten houses at the top of the street can be connected to a different, under-utilized transformer. Total: 400 cedis. And they could do it Friday (uncommonly quick). Which makes me pretty certain the workers left whatever job they were supposed to be doing on Friday for a little cash job.

A came home around six on Friday to find them just finishing up the work. I think the last connections were made by feel as the sun quickly set. As they finished, up the lights came on, went off, quavered. But when they were on I was convinced they were brighter. This is very hopeful.

Finally, around 7:00pm they were done and every house on the street had ‘lights on.’ The lights were looking bright, the fridge was purring, and the fans were making more cooling wind than ever before.

At 7:10 the entire city was plunged into darkness.

Epilogue:

The city-wide outage lasted about 4 hours. Jokingly, I claimed our street, not facing its usual black out, had overloaded the whole system. Again, Saturday night we had our usually black out, but this time it was much shorter. And the really good news is that we haven’t had a brown out since the switch over; the fridge has continued to run.