Electricity Palaver: Blackouts, Generators, and the Return to the Grid

For almost a decade now, my family and I have been living off the grid on electricity. We have run on generators for virtually everything, spending on gasoline alone to get electricity for our needs. Now, after so long, we are back on the grid. Experiencing the life of living on mains electricity again makes me have mixed feelings, however, and I am contemplating the true essence of being back on it.

How leaving happened in the first place.

Over here, electricity isn't regular. There are days, maybe weeks, that we may not have electricity. The blackouts don't imply that we will be compensated with more electricity in the coming days. We resume the status quo and continue our lives with the unpredictable and undependable electricity we are provided with.

It shouldn't be much of a problem with irregularities since we would simply pay for the power we consume when the electricity is back on. However, such wasn't the case before, especially at the time we went off the grid.

There are two types of subscription to the electricity here. One either uses the prepaid option, or they use the postpaid option. The prepaid simply implies that one pays for what they use, while postpaid means there is a fix charge, regardless of the amount of power one consumes. Postpaid was what we used back then.

Putting the pieces together, one would see that using the postpaid option with such irregularities in power supply doesn't make much sense, especially when the "fixed charges" are outrageous.

Now, what happens when anyone on this postpaid plan doesn't make payment is that the power distribution peeps send a team over to disconnect one from their supply. And one would get back on the supply when they make payments, even for the period that they were disconnected. Yes, it's that absurd. We happened to be in that category one day.

It was a Saturday morning, I think, and they sent their team to disconnect us. We solicited their grace to give us some more time and not disconnect us, but our pleas fell on deaf ears, and they went ahead to do it. It was disappointing, and when my parents thought about how unreliable, inconsistent, and expensive the electricity was anyway, they concluded that we lived on the generators.

It turned out that we were better off without their electricity, and we were more in control. It was even a much cheaper option, as the cost of gasoline at that time was pretty low compared to what we have now. It made sense to live that way, and so we stayed that way for years and got used to it.

The present

Times have changed, however, and life now just doesn't even resemble life back then in any way. For one, the price of fuel is at least seven times what it was then. It is more or less suicide to keep living on gasoline generators and needing to buy gasoline every now and then.

We eventually relocated to a different environment. Where we moved, however, had no supply of electricity. It was a rather underdeveloped environment at that time. Nonetheless, we moved and have been there to date. Our off-the-grid lifestyle automatically resumed, and we kept running on gasoline generators and also needed to get fuel every now and then.

For the reason that gasoline is way too expensive for comfort, we are never really able to run it for as long as we need to in a day. We'd stay without electricity normally and then use the generators when we needed to charge our devices or do something like pump water into our tanks. Still, it was a pretty challenging life to live. Imagine, as a Hiver and one that needs to be on the internet regularly, being unable to be productive because the gadgets you use may be low on battery or something.

After five good years of living that way—excluding the prior 4 years in the former environment—we finally have electricity in the community. I was excited to learn about it and, eventually, experience electricity that's not from generators. I think I felt more like a person who was seeing a car for the first time in their life. Just imagine that.

Ever since we had grid electricity installed, we have been experiencing blackouts, as usual, but regular supplies of electricity. As I write this, though, it is yet another blackout that I am experiencing. But it's okay, as long as there'll be electricity tomorrow.

What's up with the "mixed feelings," then?

BILLS. The damns bills is the problem now. Unlike before, we have our own meter and run on prepaid plans. But that just started. For three weeks, we had the electricity coming without needing to pay because the power peeps brought it in much later, two days ago or so. Prepaid is the way to go, but the new issue is the rate at which units of electricity are sold to us. From what I see, we are going to have to pay quite a lot for electricity from now on.

I don't want the electricity taken away from me, though. The only thing I can think of is to find ways to minimise how much electricity we consume every day so that we pay much less and can keep our sanity. That's what I will be doing from now, actually-observing. Meanwhile, I'll celebrate the new win for my family and the community in which I reside.