A few years back my heart went out to my brethren New Yorkers, who in the midst of a blackout, panicked to the point of suicide and falling down stairs in the dark. I could not help thinking, why not light some candles? In Nepal, there is hardly any electricity during the dry season. For 8 months of the year, when there is no rainfall or snow melt from the mighty Himals, there is nothing to power the water turbines that supply the country with 240V, plus or minus. So all electricity must be bought from our neighbors in India, who have their own power problems, electric and political. The doled out juice from India trickles down to the Nepalese people 4 hours at a time, a few times a day, in a national practice called loadshedding. And we never know when it's coming.
The government used to publish a loadshedding schedule, where you could see on a chart that divides up the city of Kathmandu into zones, at what time you would have electricity but your neighbor not, however, that created an unworkable peak demand several times a day, as everyone within a powered zone would rush to charge and run their electrical equipment all at once: to recharge electric tuk-tuks and taxis, printing presses, web servers, arc welders, hair dryers, plasma TVs, desktops and laptops – the whole range of gizmos that are ubiquitous to all of us, each coming on at the same time to completely blow out the grid 6 times on the daily loadshedding schedule. So the government stopped publishing the schedule; now you never know when the power will be on, but when it does light up your life, everyone jumps to the switches to begin powering up the machine that feeds the beast, whichever machine may be.
For me, that's a small
A/V studio that produces music and video, as well as graphic designs for web and print. We have about 6-8 staff and half dozen or so Macs of various shapes and colors. We run Protools LE on iMacs and video edit on laptops. We have a wired and wireless lan and the typical liveroom full of cables, gizmos, instruments and cameras. And we are open at least 8 hours a day or more with only 4 hours of electricity. How so you ask?
We don't have solar to speak off; PV material is not available on the market. But every house and business has panels on the roof – for hot water! Everyone has hot water…when there is water to be had. So we use truck batteries for power. Big ones. For example, these:
It takes 5 of these monster batteries and a small inverter (with additional charger) to power my "executive suite" on the top floor of my
studio. I have a window seat, but no glass…not required here. The battery/inverter combo can supply up to 800 watts for about 4 hours, so I run my office on about 400 watts for 8 hours.
That means that when I am on battery power, I don't use an iMac, I use my MBP with low-watt external drives. I have a 4-watt low voltage bulb in the desk lamp and on some nights when the power is waning and even the router is using too many watts, I will have to make a conscious decisions like which flash drive to plug in and transfer my work over to a Macbook so I can continue working – old Apple Shuffles use more then a 4gig camera chip I've found out – or do I use the 65 watt power brick or the 85 watt one to power the laptop?
When minutes translate into watts, and watts is what brings in the rice, it gets real interesting during the work day making these kinds of choices…do I save power and use the Macbook, or indulge and do my work on the MBP in gorgeous high-resolution instead? These are not the typical choices a designer in NYC must ever make, but here in Nepal, that's just the way it is.
Which brings me to the point of this bog post. We can all do with less. In fact, we can do an amazing lot with just about nothing. And that's good news considering the downward spiral in the global economy and the threat of
Conflicker looming. My pals in Cali tell me they may soon be designing on inverters and batteries as well, since the business climate there is in a tailspin, so I guess I am here to say -
who needs lights anyway.
