LIGHTEN THE LOAD

As South Africans spend more and more time in the dark, here's everything you need know about switching to a more stable, reliable and planet-friendly - electricity supply.

- KEITH BAIN

You ou are not alone. All around the world, individual households, large businesses and governments - including that of the United States, and our own house-of-cards cabinet with its crisis-management Minister of Electricity are pondering how to secure the future of energy on the planet.

In South Africa, it's not the future we need to secure, but the next four hours as well as the many hours of scheduled load-shedding to follow that. Adverts for solar power installations are appearing on every (unlit) lamppost, and the sale of inverters is off the charts - but, with so many options, what should you do?

Start with...

The one solution is to invest in a generator. It's a surefire - but very noisy - way to have instant power whenever load-shedding kicks in. While it forgoes the need to worry about battery capacity and lifespan, the impact of noise pollution and the cost of diesel are concerning, with small business owners spending thousands of Rands just to keep the lights on (literally).

For those homes with more limited needs, a smaller solar generator (such as those produced by Ecoboxx, priced from R2 999) may be a less invasive choice. It weighs only 9kg and can be used to power a pair of LED lights, or maybe a fan, TV set, Wi-Fi router, laptop or radio. That's useful for the brief outages but, for many, a more convenient medium-term solution is an inverter system.

Invest in an inverter