The Word of mAn[S]o0r

This post is over from Karachi Metroblogs, along with the comment i made to it.

Getting rid of KESC woes...
posted by Khurram Farooq at 9:13 PM on April 23, 2006

As Karachi Metblog readers may know, the summer is here and we are all facing relentless loadshedding from the KESC. In our flat, we typically have an outage of 1 hour in the morning and an outage of 1 hour ni the evening. Besides this, there are sometimes outages of 15 minutes to 2 hours whenever they feel like it. An outage at 3am in the morning of course means another sleepy day at the office. Even then, I am luckier than the people who are facing 5-6 hours of loadshedding every day.

So in the end I took matters in my own hand and went out to buy a UPS + inverter. Some of you may not know what this device does so I'll give a brief explanation. What you have is a single box which acts as a UPS (an Uninterruptible Power Supply, which switches your power from the mains to the battery when the mains goes out) and an inverter (which converts DC from a battery source into AC which can be used to power the home). This device cost me 6,000rs for a 1.5KVA unit. I also bought a 140A, 12V battery which cost me 4,000rs. For a grand total of 10,000rs, I no longer have to worry about the shenanigans of KESC. During loadshedding, selected lights and fans in the house switch over to power from the UPS and I can continue doing my work happily.

In my opinion, this is a must buy for all Karachiites. There are cheaper versions available. You can buy a UPS which has less power, or is of some other cheaper company for around 3,000rs also. Mileage may vary, but it's better than sitting in the dark.

Moral: It is better to buy a UPS, than to curse the darkness ;)

Comments

Good suggestion! We recently went for a UPS for our office, since the daily outtages meant anywhere from 2 to 6 hours of lost work. But instead of an inverter, we went for a generator solution.

Before all of you start going on the UPS solution, i'd like to point out one fact. When placing a UPS, especially the car (liquid) battery, make sure its in an airy place. Not somewhere closed like a room. I repeat, make sure the battery is located in an airy place. The electrolysis process (mayb i've got the name wrong) inside the battery also produces fumes which are harmful for humans in the long run, and can cause cancer.

In our office, we went for a more expensive (but health conscious) solution of getting a dry-state UPS, since ours is placed inside.

Just puttin in my 2 rs. worth. Hopefully it'll help out someone.

P.S. If keeping it inside is inevitable, put balloons on the tops of the screws on the battery, since that is the only place the fumes escape from. Then every month (or whenever the balloon fills up) take it off, and release it outside, and replace it. May sound like extra work, but believe me, its better than even the *possibility* of cancer.

Posted by: mansoor at April 24, 2006 04:37 PM