If any of you have lived overseas, you know that something we take for granted — dependable and fairly stable electricity — isn’t the norm in a lot of places. A number of places we’ve been it was necessary to plan events around when you guessed the power would be on — at least “full on.” Brownouts were commonplace.
One of the first experiences with dealing with these issues came shortly after we arrived at a new post. The first night in out new quarters, we were both tired from days of travel and “moving in” to the new place. We figured we’d just go to bed and get a fresh start the next morning. We went into the upstairs bedroom, but the lights wouldn’t come on — neither would the ceiling fan. I figured the fuse had blown and after searching — and finding — the “fuse box.” I couldn’t find anything wrong, so we just went to bed — leaving my expert troubleshooting for morning.
About midnight, all the lights came on VERY bright and the ceiling fan was turning so fast it almost shook the room — sounded like a helicopter. There was also a very loud buzzing noise. I ran around turning off some of the lights and the ceiling fan. I had no idea what happened, but we certainly had (lots of) electricity upstairs
The next day, I had time to explore and discovered a few things about our house — and — the neighborhood. It turns out that the house was located only about half a block from a strip of, for lack of a better name, “bars.” Exploring the house, I found on top of the refrigerator (why there, of all locations, I don’t know) a step-down/step-up transformer. The transformer had a power surge alarm…. yep, a buzzer.
So here’s the results of my troubleshooting and analysis of the problem: All the bars down the street turned on their air conditioners about 4:00 pm, just in time for happy hour I suppose. All those air conditioners used up just about all available electricity. There was a curfew when we were there that went into effect at midnight. So — the bars closed down at midnight and shut off their air conditioners. When that happened, all the electricity surged back in to the rest of the neighborhood.
It turned out that wasn’t too bad — at least it was predictable — some places we lived you never knew when, or if, you’d have electricity.
We learned to step-up the transformer before 4:00 and turn on any lights or fans we thought we might need, and we also learned to step-down the transformer before we went to bed. That prevented the ceiling fan from trying to take off and the alarm buzzer from waking up the whole neighborhood.
So, do I miss times like those? Actually, sometimes I do…..
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