Just last week, Eskom announced that that they would be implementing another round of Stage 2 Load Shedding in some of South Africa’s main urban areas. Load Shedding has been a major issue in our country recently, and 2015 looks set to be characterized by more outages across the grid. Electricity supply is a problem as generation just can’t keep up with demand. So what does that mean for your home and family?
You have two choices. You can either accept what is an unavoidable consequence of our growing population and outdated power grid, or you can take matters in to your own hands and run a private generator on your property.
How a Generator Can Help You to Overcome Load Shedding
Potentially, you could use an electrical generator to power your whole home, however this wouldn’t be economically feasible, nor is it necessary. Instead, many families in South Africa are choosing to use generators at times when load shedding is most inconvenient. This could be while entertaining guests, while cooking, or simply when you need to provide lighting in your home.
Even a small electrical generator could provide enough electricity to keep essential appliances running during blackouts.
Smaller generators like a 4300 watt inverter generator would be ideal for emergency use when the lights go out. A typical refrigerator/freezer combo requires about 3000 watts of electricity to run. This could be one appliance that you don’t want to leave off when the power goes out, especially if you’re expecting a blackout to last all night. Food could spoil, costing you money to replace it. Opting for a small generator could save you the trouble.
With 4300 watts you would still have electricity to spare, enabling you to run emergency lighting, charge laptop computers and cell phones, or even use small kitchen and personal appliances.
Generators are convenient, and an inverter generator especially would be safe for home use. You can connect your electrical devices directly to an inverter generator, and modern units like the ones offered by Subaru Power Products offer impressive safety features like overload shutoff circuits, protecting the generator even if you’ve tried to draw too much power from it.
Load shedding is a massive inconvenience, but it’s also unavoidable. Unfortunately, in our current situation this is the only way to protect the national grid during peak demand. Without load shedding, excess demand could cause failures on the power grid that could potentially cause blackouts lasting months rather than hours.
The only thing that you really need to decide is whether you’re happy to endure the seemingly never ending rounds of load shedding, or if you’re ready to take the power back in to your own hands with an electrical generator for home use.
