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During my search for solutions to the power problems we experience in Simon’s Town I came across a few articles from Kabouse le Roux. And I thought they will be relevant to the readers of this blog.
Kabous le Roux
Wed, 09 Jan 2008
Need a reason to save electricity? The National Electricity Regulator recently gave Eskom permission to raise its tariffs by 14.2 percent. This increase is the first of many drastic price adjustments necessary to finance the accelerated capital expenditure programme. The days of cheap power are gone. For good.
Need another reason? How about the survival of the human race? Maybe you do not know how polluting electricity use is? I can understand that. When you plug something into the wall it doesn’t start spewing exhaust fumes from the socket. But the pollution is there, at the filthy coal fuelled power plants where most of South Africa’s electricity is generated.
How can you save humanity and a Rand or two while you’re at it? Attack the biggest energy user first!
According to Eskom water heating accounts for about 40 percent of energy consumed in a home, making this the easiest place to start saving electricity. Here’s how you can heat the water, not the sky:
Turn the thermostat down to the lowest temperature you’re comfortable with. Why make the water blistering hot if you can’t use it like that? What a waste to mix in cold water in your shower to lower the temperature! For most people lowering the temperature from 70 to 60 degrees Celsius will be perfectly acceptable and will reduce the cost of supplying hot water by 4.8 percent.
Use less water. Install aerating, low-flow faucets and showerheads. Take more showers than baths - bathing uses the most hot water in the average household. Fix leaking taps – 30 drops per minute from a hot water tap wastes around 18 kilowatts per month. At 35c per kilowatt (That’s the old price, by the way) you’ll save R6.30.
Insulate. Home improvement or hardware stores sell geyser blankets that that reduce energy use by up to 15 percent for a family of two. That’s about 21 kilowatts per month or R7.35 at the old price. Don’t stop there, though. Insulate the room where your geyser is and if it’s in the garage, keep the door shut. You can save even more by insulating the first couple of metres of the hot and cold water pipes connected to the geyser. With a standard, non insulated geyser and a four metre hot water pipe the losses are R40.12 (at 35 cents per kilowatt) per month. Also, keep in mind that a horizontal geyser loses more heat than a geyser with the same volume placed vertically.
Turn it off! Switch your geyser off when you get home from work and switch it back on when you go to bed. Shower or bath in the mornings. You’ll save a small fortune. Furthermore, remember to turn it off when you’re out of town.
Wash your clothes with cold water. Is it really necessary to wash your clothes with hot water? Maybe warm water will do the job just as well? Better yet, what about cold water? If your laundry is heavily soiled and greasy you might need the water to be hot, but normally cold water will be perfectly okay.
Buy a solar water heater. A 150 litre solar water heater will replace about 4.5 kilowatts of electricity per day, totalling two tons of carbon emissions per year!
Buy a new geyser. If yours is more than 10 years old, it uses much more electricity than the efficient new models on sale nowadays.
Buy dishwashers and washing machines that are ‘ENERGY STAR’ compliant. Americans buying ENERGY STAR appliances saved enough energy in 2006 alone to avoid greenhouse gas emissions equivalent to those from 25 million cars!
We need to stop wasting electricity! Just because I can afford to basically use as much electricity as I want to does not mean it is ethically correct to use a single watt more than that which meets my needs. An office with lights blazing long after everyone has left doesn’t meet any needs; it just squanders a scarce resource that is costly and destructive to produce.
We need to realise that paying for electricity does not absolve us from responsibility for the detrimental effects of generating it. The price of electricity does not indicate it.
I believe that Kabouse’s advice is the responsible way out of this power crisis. And it reminded me of the fact that you and me, in our personal capacity, has the power and the responsibility to make a difference.
SimonsTownRealty: Sell, Buy A Simon’s Town Property? Phone Today 021-7864028 or 082 870 2004 How Do You Care For Your Second Home When You Are From Out Of Town? Ask The Local Eye To Take Care.
Can you believe it; a Zimbabwean giving us tips on power cuts. It’s a sad day for South Africa and my fellow Simon’s Town home owners but we will read these tips because we are desperate for answers. This article is not only a reminder of current state of affairs it’s only so interesting and has solid advice. I will go for solar panels to keep this laptop going.
This article was originally published on page 1 of Sunday Independent on January 20, 2008
Peta Thornycroft, our Zimbabwe correspondent, reports from Johannesburg on how to deal with power cuts…
What an incredible fuss you South Africans make about a few power cuts.
I happened to lie down next to my battery-operated satellite radio for a nap this week after the season’s only two hours of summer whacked me out.
I heard the likeable David O’Sullivan sounding unlikeable. Okay. He was in a rage, so angry he sounded as though he might burst an artery, or the membrane holding his brain in place. About Eskom.
Generators farting rhythmically through long days and dark nights
I couldn’t believe my ears. As far as I can remember, in this past week there were only about six cuts, and none longer than five hours.
Same thing at the pharmacy: moan, moan, moan. Then it struck me - for the first time in my life I had really useful knowledge.
I do know about electricity cuts and what to do about them.
I know about boilers, paraffin fridges, wicks and lighting the lamps by pumping them hard at 5.30pm.
Please, South African householders, unless you live on more than an acre, don’t get a generator.
‘First rule for survival: get a solar panel’
There will be murder in the streets of Parkhurst, the Berea in Durban and Obs in Cape Town if home owners on tiny bits of land all have generators farting rhythmically through long days and dark nights.
Even small generators use 1 litre of diesel per hour. And they get stolen easily unless cemented in and you need monster ones to do fridges and stoves.
Leave generators to Raymond Ackerman and his ilk.
First rule for survival: get a solar panel on the roof, which is connected to an especially large car battery in your house, which is then attached to an inverter, which in turn has a switch that lights up the world.
This system keeps a TV, DSTV encoder, DVD player, mobile and laptop chargers going. And it costs nothing to run. The bigger the battery, the more lights. (Ditch desktop computers today.) It doesn’t do fridges (more about fridges later) and it doesn’t do electric stoves.
Go for gas. Mozambique has 300 years of gas, and the ANC government - even though it chose to do the arms deal instead of electricity - did put in a pipeline for gas from Mozambique.
If you live in the older suburbs of Johannesburg phone up the angels (seriously) at eGoli Gas and they will look on the map to see if you have a gas pipe in your street.
If you have, then get connected. Gas geysers also work at a fraction of the cost of electricity if you don’t go for solar-heated water.
Refrigerators are another thing altogether.
If you keep the doors shut, a tall one will keep food from going off during a power cut of about 30 hours. A deep freeze lasts about 2,5 days if you don’t open it. Longer than that and the food goes off.
After all, you can shop daily in South Africa. Raymond Ackerman is going to keep the generators running.
Most Zimbabwe-owned supermarkets shut down during power cuts. Only foreign-connected ones such as Spar have generators, or those owned by Zanu-PF chefs (political elite), as they get cheap fuel.
You must conserve power. You have a chance to do this because you still do have commerce and industry. We lost our industry over the past few years, so that sector can’t really help much.
We have more or less given up mining. Except, except, and think about this: your mining houses can buy power with foreign currency directly from Cahora Bassa and pay in US dollars, as they are doing in Zimbabwe now. It is a bit more expensive than Eskom, but it keeps the platinum pouring out.
We also don’t have any robots left in our streets, and little traffic, so we don’t have the kind of traffic jams I saw along Jan Smuts Avenue in Jo’burg on Thursday during a power cut.
We don’t kill each other in fuel queues, and we don’t have road rage as our roads are mostly gone. Nor do we kill each other in banks, even when there is no money there, or in supermarkets. Well, only very, very occasionally, and only once, over sugar and that was in Bulawayo, which is very far from town.
So bear up, improvise and go get the solar, inverter, battery alternatives, and gas. And you will all survive until you have enough new power sources within eight years, so I hear, and you are not going to be nearly as short of foreign currency as Zim, so can import some power.
But Zimbabwe will recover sooner than South Africa, because our population is in Hillbrow.
Can the painful reality be funny?
SimonsTownRealty: Sell, Buy A Simon’s Town Property? Phone Today 021-7864028 or 082 870 2004 How Do You Care For Your Second Home When You Are From Out Of Town? Ask The Local Eye To Take Care.
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