I'm glad your generator is handling things. Just out of interest how often are you experiencing power outages and what duration are they?
Since September 1st we have been given increased load shedding shedules of 9 - 10 hours daily! We have also been told expect to put up with load shedding to some degree for the next 3 years at least!
Zambia is almost 100% reliant on Hydro electric power. The impressive Kariba dam on the mighty Zambezi river producing a large percentage of the Nation's power, as well a number of various other hydro electric plants. The problem we have been facing since around March this year is blamed on numerous factors:
The powers that be largely blame the usually reliable rainfall which over the past 2 years has been very poor resulting in much lower than normal water levels in dams across the country. This is true to a degree.
What isn't acknowledged so much is the mismangement, lack of planning for the future and looking at alternative power sources other than hydro electric.
Upgraded original British pumps at Kariba funded by the Chinese now require considerable extra water throughput to generate the same amount of power as their older British counterparts.
Development in Zambia has been quite positive over the past 2 decades and consequently demand for power has increased substantially (largely from heavy industry such as our expansive mining sector and growing agricultural development). Sadly investment in electricity provision has not kept up.
Power in Zambia is cheap, very cheap and this also adds to the government electricity supplier ZESCO battling for capital to invest in new projects.
The list goes on and on, and I won't bore you all with more details, but suffice to say the outlook regarding electricity in the region is quite bleak. Not only are the outages long and frequent, but power spikes and low voltages are a constant issue.
Also have you considered rather using an
absorption refrigerator which can run on LPG or even a 12v battery? They're often sold as camping fridges. You could set up a solar panel and battery charger and use LPG as a back-up power source if there's insufficient solar. I'm sure this would work out cheaper in the long run and would remove the headaches of constantly servicing and fueling the genny not to mention removing the noise pollution as well.
The genset that we have been discussing has been test run for about 1hr 30mins and appeared to handle the starting amps - one could hear it taking a bit of strain on the odd occasion. The F/F compressor starts up about once every 25mins. Running amps is quite low and the genset seems to cope with that happily. What I don't want is to be reliant for any great period of time on such a small genset, its really there as a backup to our old Lister 7.5kVa 3 phase genset, which touch wood is running said fridge and a number of other components - but she is old.
For now I'm stuck with my DEFY 230V 380ltr fridge/freezer. What I may consider doing in the not too distant future is looking to invest in some kind of invertor battery based system as a backup for the vaccine F/F for when the power is off. I may also like to compliment this with solar owing to our abundance of sunshine in this part of the world. I would also like to add in the ability to power my chicken lights and borehole pump.
