Electricity is a good thing. We ran the hotel for two seasons off the grid, and although now we have 6 years under our belt on the grid and those early days are fading I still appreciate my computer, an A/C at home and all the other luxuries electricity provides. Jim also lived for 2 and a half years at a site with no electricity in the Dominican Republic. I visited him there for 6 months. It’s funny, we are certainly not the “rouging it” types, why have we ended up in places where one of the basics of modern living is well, not so basic? Who knows! Just lucky I guess.
I looked on the internet tonight and found that ~30% of the world population doesn’t have access to electricity at all. I also found out that Americans use about 6 times as much juice per capita as we south of the border-ians use. (USDE). I suppose there is a lot of incentive for us to conserve here in Mexico as we pay 3 times the price per kWh as Americans do. Yikes.
I have learned more about electricity since I moved here than I thought it would ever know (and not all from the internet). We now own our own transformer (cheaper rates) and have in house meters. We love our tri-phase system, and have regulators on everything to help with the brownouts. They are actually worse than total power outages as motors, fridges and AC burn out in no time running on half power. Generators aren’t worth the trouble, and, always have gravity flow water so that even when the electricity is out you can still flush the toilet!
The reason that the electricity issue comes up again and again is that our on the grid situation is not reliable. As many of our guests know, we have electricity outages about 3 times a season for no apparent reason, (luckily they usually are fixed within a few hours) and, for your information, we have tons more in the summer.
It’s the rain, and the dust – when they get together, they make mud and one thing transformers and fuses and all things electrical certainly do not like to be covered in – is mud. We have seen transformers at night with lava flowing out of them (who knows why). Last night we had about 10 drops of rain, the first 10 drops of summer and those equated to 10 hours with out electricity.
Holy Cow! I was so excited to see your blog, Eva. I check the website periodically to see if anything is new and just to daydream a minute about Eden. I hate when I'm midyear and feel faraway. You've just brought me closer! I love seeing and reading about the construction progress. But, I especially liked the one about summer: the rain, the bugs and the frogs. Where's the "Myrth" come from? I'll be back.... K.
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