Playing the power game

IT’S now 21 years since many South Africans got the yips about where the country was going. The arrival of democracy was an unknown and it made folk nervous.

So they stocked pantries with tins of bully beef and other “essential” food supplies for what they believed was inevitable … a sort of South African Armageddon. It didn’t happen and those “many” later had a lot of bully beef to get through.

Today, among any number of crises this country faces – you name it, there’s a crisis – could well be another Armageddon.

One that concerns many of us is a collapse of the electricity power supply.

We get all sorts of mixed messages that it will, that it won’t, and we hope for the latter. And what do we do? Many stick their head in the sand and pray it won’t.

We collect a few lights and torches, a candle or two, and hope that power outages and loadshedding will be the worst that happens.

Others buy generators, set up solar panels on the roof, solar-powered hot water systems, revamp the wiring network in their house – all of it costing perhaps hundreds of thousands of rands – and they smugly sit tight waiting for the rest of us to face what they believe will be the inevitable consequences of total blackout.

The Chiels hope we will be able to cope without too much outside assistance. Okay, call us naive. We know it will be tough, but we feel we can get by. We have gas to cook on and to heat water.

Washing and showering will be a problem, but we feel we can manage. (No, not what you might be thinking “they’ll just go without!”)

Not at all. We’ll heat water, transfer it into our camping shower and use that.

And if we run short of gas, we have a practically inexhaustible supply of dry wood outside around the house for both cooking and heating.

One big question mark for many in the event of a long-term power cut is “how are we going to manage without fridges and freezers?”

Good question. We rely heavily on these to keep food fresh and meat frozen.

Hopefully supermarkets, corner stores and butcheries have by now installed their own generators to keep perishables fresh, so we’ll merely have to shop more often.

For us, camping equipment bought over the years will help a bit.

We have a small Engel fridge/freezer that does a wonderful job keeping essentials fresh and cool when we are in the bush.

Mrs C worries about food; I’m more interested in ice and cold beers!

It works off a large deep cycle 105 amp battery that is charged by our bakkie alternator – that, of course, is only when the engine is running.

A couple of years ago when camping at Mana Pools in Zimbabwe, we had a problem.

We weren’t driving around much because we were able to enjoy plenty of excitement and game and bird viewing from our campsite, so the battery discharged quicker than we could charge it.

We’re going that way again soon and the only solution has been to go solar and charge the battery using the sun.

Ed Schwulst, one of our party on the trip, is a practical man of many talents, and put a system together to keep his camp fridge working. He made another for me and let me tell you I’ve been having a lot of fun experimenting and trying it out at home before we go.

I merely put the solar panels outside in the morning, connect them to and run their power into the battery through various electronic gizmos, and voilà, it runs day and night with temperatures from 4°C on fridge mode to minus-10°C on moderate freezer. Cool hey!

And in future we’ll use it at home too should any power emergency arise.