Power Down Wakeup Call

[Tarrel]

The irritating, and embarrassing, thing is I have a smart charger (Lidl - £14.99). Just hadn't got round to putting the (fairly new) battery on it! Also, the battery was in one place, the charger in another, the extension lead somewhere else. Lesson learned; have a "go" box of all the necessary items, so that it is easy to pick up the (charged) battery, connect the inverter, run the extension lead and plug in our mission-critical items - all by torchlight if necessary.

The other thing we were reminded of, is that the Number One benefit that electricity provides is light, followed probably by refrigeration. We have LED halogen-replacement down-lighters in our kitchen (5 Watts each). When the power came back on, by way of an experiment, I turned them all off bar one. The light that this single 5W LED provided was so much greater than that of the four candles we'd had lit during the power cut. There was no comparison. Technically, a 100Ah car battery could power such a bulb 24 hours a day for 10 days straight!

On a related issue, it's quite worrying that nobody has yet figured out what caused the outage.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-27058766