I think I'll add my two cent's worth (of experience!). I grew up in Key West, Florida. Our electicity came from a local generating plant and one ont eh next island, both of which were quite old. I think it was in the mid 1980s that the main plant was constantly breaking down at the same time they were refitting everything to burn a less expensive fuel oil. The result was that they couldn't keep up with demand, and we had scheduled "brown-outs" of about 4 hours per day, twice a day. We also had daily UN-scheduled outages as well, which could last anywhere from five minutes to five hours.
At the same time, our seawater desalinization plant was falling apart. (Built by Westinghouse as an experimental project in the early 60s and given a life expectnacy of 10 years.) So we had water hours as well. For about 2 hours per day, you had water pressure on the ground floor, and a reasonable trickle on the next floor level. During non-hours, you could fill a glass in about 5 minutes. We had a well and a cistern, so we always had water. However, if we wanted hot water for the bath, we had to heat it on the stove in the kitchen, carry the pot 60 feet to the other end of the house, up 22 steps to the bathroom. For cold water, we just hooked the garden hoze nozzle on a ship's pulley and hoisted it upstairs to the back porch, and brought the hose in through the bathroom door. But unless you could take to 60 degree well water or 68 degree cistern water, you were stuck with schlepping that big pot of hot water. (Heck, we never went swimming unless the ocean was at least 78! Freezing cold at anything below that!) We lived with some electric and som water for about two years, and learned valuable skills of how to adapt, how to do without, and always have plenty of oil lamps and candles ready. In the evenings, we always had a small votive candle going in the living room, so that if we had an unscheduled outage, we would have just enough light by which to get more lamps, candles, flashlights... Thurlow in Lancaster, OH [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] containing the line: unsubscribe lace-chat [EMAIL PROTECTED] For help, write to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
