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the electricity here is only on every other day. it goes roughly from 6pm to 6pm. andrea, the italian who installed our inverter, has been here for 11 years and says that it is getting worse. initially it was only off for 3 hours a day. the current (ha!) format of day on/day off started abruptly in recent years when kenya went through a drought. apparently, all of lake victoria’s water comes in from kenya and exits via the nile in uganda, among others. anyway, the drought caused a nine meter drop in water level and occurred concurrently (ha!) with a proposed dam construction for power for uganda. so. not so much of the electricity.

back to the inverter. to have electricity on the off days you can either get a generator or an inverter. generators make noise and diesel fumes and diesel is $4.20 a gallon. you have to start the generator and turn it off manually. you know how when you read in bed and have to get up to walk the 5 feet to switch off the light switch on the wall? if that doesn’t sound familiar, it’s because you have a bedside lamp next to you for the specific purpose of not doing the above. imagine finishing reading and then having to get up to go outside behind the apartment to shut off the power. yeah. no.

an inverter is a box about the size of a coca cola fridge pack that is connected to the main power supply (with a serious on/off switch in between – the kind you would flip in the natural to get all the stadium lights to come on). the inverter is connected to six batteries each the size of three car batteries and each weighing 70 kilograms. you can get more batteries if you want and if you have the money. we got six to power the fridge and the lights but left the two water heaters out of the loop. so when the power is on the inverter draws power to charge the batteries. when the power goes off, the inverter sends all those watts, amps and volts right back out and other than a little flicker at the changeover, we never know the difference. it takes about 6 hours to charge the batteries in full, and other than the melting extension cord incident when we didn’t know the fuse was blown, we’ve never run out of power. 101phil 101africa