Load Shed
Random SETI road trip story. After our work was done at the MeerKAT telescope in the Karoo Desert, we all headed back to Cape Town, with plans to spend the rest of the trip sightseeing. Dave, Kevin, Buddy, and I arrived at our AirBnB in a nice part of town. Having booked this place, Dave got first pick and naturally chose the master bedroom for himself. I then claimed the one room upstairs as it had its own bathroom and ample distance far from everybody else.
I felt pretty smug about my choice until I settled in and found the room to be way too hot and stuffy. Some quick searching in the closet uncovered a fan. Phew. I plugged it in. Didn't work. No!! But also in the closet was a heater which had a "fan only" option. Phew.
Well, let's go explore! There was minor panic as the sliding back door to the patio refused to lock. We spent a while figuring out the alarm system to protect our precious belongings when out and about.
Since it was late in the day we simply walked down the hill to dine at a nearby restaurant called Mozambik. While eating I downloaded the app on my phone which warns all residents in South Africa in advance when and where power would disappear. The country's grid hit its limit a while ago, so there's a "load shedding" regime in place where people endure scheduled blackouts, sometimes several hours in a chunk a couple times a day, depending on weather, load, and neighborhood median income. It's kind of amazing the country gets by living like this.
Back at the house I crashed out quickly and slept soundly. But around 4:30am I woke sweaty and creeped out by the unexpected silence of my fan not working. The quiet was broken by a fly buzzing around the room. Fuck me. I checked the time on my phone - I got a wifi signal so we seemingly still had power. And I checked the load shedding app and it said Cape Town wasn't supposed to be off right now. Then I remembered I used the heater as a fan. Maybe in this self-contradictory mode it overexerted itself and I blew a breaker? Once again: fuck me.
I got up to pee and then looked for that breaker box. "Must be in the garage," I thought, and there I found it. And whaddaya know - one breaker seemed tripped. I reset it and went back upstairs but no dice. Only then, now more awake and aware, I realized the whole house had no electricity, not just my room. But if that's the case.. how was the wifi working?
I walked over to the wifi/internet complex and discovered it plugged into battery backup power. Of course it was. Makes sense given the alarm system. And that everybody needs internet all the time. I rechecked the load shedding app and only then realized the geographic resolution was finer than I thought - once I looked up my exact neighborhood I confirmed we were indeed in the middle of a planned load sharing event. Well, duh.
So much for catching up on much needed sleep. The fan popped back on the outage ended at 6am. Yay.