Electricity

Electricity is something I didn't have much of when I was living in the bush. Then I had a setup of a solar panel, inverter, and a large battery. This was enough to power my laptop, flashlight, e-reader, and a bit of evening electricty from the lightbulb in my tukel. Life in the big city has much more electricity but still has its limits. City power exists but is horribly unreliable and we can go for months without it so we mainly depend on our generator. This means life tends to run on a schedule. The workday starts when the generator goes on, and ends when the generator goes off. It also means that suppertime revolves around when we have power since we use the electricity to cook. We still do have a gas stove/oven combo but since gas is expensive and electricity is "free" this cuts down on some of the costs of living here.

Running a fridge/freezer also is pretty good out here if you keep it full which isn't too hard as it also makes for good storage of foods that we don't want to go bad. Flour here comes with extra protein and freezing it for a few days will prevent the protein from reproducing. Rats also can be a nusance so anything that they would like that isn't in glass or tin containers ends up in the fridge since its rat proof. Veggies out here don't last long so I chop them up weekly and throw them into the freezer to use throughout the week (bonus is that later I just have to grab a bit of different foods to make dinner). Water bottles added to the freezer when things get low means ice water for the really hot days.

Although electricity availability can get annoying, we have settled into a routine and its not a huge bother. Probably the biggest difference from north america is that our schedule is based on the generator running and we always know where our flashlights are at any given time (and they always have charged batteries). I'm reminded of how much I've adapted to life without electricity when local people visit and they are asking why I don't have any fan or lights on when the generator is running. Unless its dark, 1/2 the time I just forget to turn things on and with natural light, why bother?