Electricity

We live in the Principal's residence. When the new principal started in 2008 she decided to live off site so the residence was vacant. It is on the first floor above a classroom. The photo above is in the corner of the classroom and our electricity is delivered via the black cable in the top left of the photo.

The electricity supply to the school is reasonably stable - generally one to two outages a day, but from the photo above up the black cable to our house magical things happen. We have many outages where the switch on our board upstairs 'trips' due to low or high voltage.

The problem with our switchboard when we arrived was that it had 250 chairs, a full drum kit an electric rhythm and a bass guitar stacked in front of it so when the power went off AM morphs into Spiderman and clambers over the top of everything to reset the switch. It did not take AM too long to realise that this was hazardous to his health so the chairs were restacked to enable a passage to the switchboard (photo above).

There are times when the power goes off in our house but is on everywhere else and no matter how many resets we do the electrician inevitably needs to come. When you call for the electrician you always get two people. The leader comes and looks wisely at things but never does anything and his offsider always carries a pair of pliers and a screwdriver. These are the only tools required apart from your teeth when wires are required to be stripped.

I have witnessed all their work and now cannot work out why my father-in-law (a retired electrician) requires so many tools when he visits to repair things although I must admit his teeth are not what they used to be.

The general reason given for loss of power is "There was a loose wire". How the wires work their way loose I do not know. The last major outage was caused by 'something missing from the switchboard in the classroom'. Nobody could explain how the power was working then. If something was missing how could it have worked in the first place? It remains an Indian mystery that we live with.

In our wanderings around the streets we marvel at the state of the wires hanging, threaded through trees, exposed to the weather - yet things still work. Below is a small collection of photos from our neighbourhood.

The feeder for our house from the classroom below

Although I'm not an electrician, I fail to understand the continued loss of power in our house after about 10 electrician call-ins, when everything else in the school and surrounding areas work.