We have lived on Mindanao long enough to understand that the power company is doing their best to keep up with demand and has exceeded our expectations by keeping the power on most of the time. In fact, we were only loosing power maybe once a week for a few hours and that was it. Nothing we couldn’t take in stride. Sure it gets hot without fans and dark at night, but it hasn’t been a big deal until now.
From what we understand the Mindanao power grid is on “Red Alert” due to a major lack of generation caused by an extremely dry dry-season. We found a schedule and some information from the power company and it looks like we can expect to have blackouts from February 16th-June 1st.
The power is scheduled to be off every-other-day for 6-8 hours and more if conditions continue to worsen.
This does a few things for us. For one thing, it is really, really hot this time of year so it is just miserable to exist day or night without fans-especially for Bailey who is 7 months pregnant. Some other problems we’re running into is how to keep food fresh and how to keep email and internet correspondence going. Because we are used to consistent power we are very reliant on internet for a lot of our communication including flight scheduling. We also don’t have security lights around the perimeter of our house during the evening blackouts and during the day we can’t use power tools.
We are starting to face the reality that we are going to need to plan on this being a way of life until June so we need to purchase a generator. Due to our close quarters with our neighbors and our desire to be “good neighbors” we are looking for a quiet generator like a Honda EU2000i. We don’t need anything big, just enough to run our office equipment, refrigerator and kitchen appliances, some household lights, security lights, and a few fans. We think 2000 watts ought to suffice.
Our other big problem is that there aren’t any of these quiet generators available in country so we have to buy one in the states at around $1,100 for the generator and $60 and 5 weeks to get it to our door. It isn’t cheap, or something we have budgeted for so it will be a stretch to get one here in a timely manner. Please pray for a couple of things. Pray for rain. We aren’t the only ones suffering in the outages. Many Filipinos depend on power for their businesses and daily lives too and it is really hard for them. Pray that we can find a good deal on a generator so we can afford one. Thanks so much for your prayers!