Lessons in Dominican Life - #1 – Power

Purchasing electricity in Dominica is a fickle process.  It is vitally important for life down here and completely different from how you pay for power in the US.  We have to pre-purchase electricity here and we use it until it is gone.  We buy it at the grocery store, the convenience mart or various cafes that sell power.

Here is how it works.  We have this power box on the wall that tells us how many kilowatt hours we have remaining.  Here is our box.  See the smiley face – that means that we are good J

As I learned on Sunday night/Monday, when the kilowatt hours drop below 30, the box begins to alarm – a high pitched continuous beeping…….

Sunday night, we realized that we had dropped below 30 kilowatt hours and that the box was going to alarm all night until we could purchase more power on Monday.  Anyway, back to the process.  We have this handy dandy power card (see below) that identifies our power box. 

You present this card to the cashier at the grocery store, handy mart, etc…… and tell her that you want to purchase electricity.  She hands you a receipt with a 28 digit code on it and you come home, enter the code into the power box and taa-dah – power. 

Well on Monday morning, I stopped by the café on campus to purchase electricity, only to find out that the power company had sold too much electricity and was not able to produce as much as they had sold.  The stores were not allowed to sell power until 9:30am, when the power company could catch up and issue credits for purchase once again.  Weird – huh…… So, Ayden and I hung out in the grocery store (one of the air conditioned spots in town) until 9:30 when we stood in line to purchase power.

We buy about $300 EC (Eastern Caribbean dollars – which equals $115 US dollars) at the time and this lasts us for about a month.  Of course, this is without running the air conditioner.  We don’t usually run the air conditioner except for about 30 minutes in our bedroom and the kid’s bedroom right when we are going to bed because it is SOOOOO expensive.  There are families down here that run the air conditioner all the time and their power bill is about $500 US a month.

When the power companies do sell too much electricity and they can’t catch up, we have rolling blackouts where the cut the power supply to various sections of town for 4 hours at the time. Thankfully, this doesn’t happen very often and we have been lucky so far…..knock on wood.

Things are good here.  We are adapting to Caribbean life and getting ready to move into a new house close to campus.  The view from up high is amazing, but we have all fallen down the hill that we live on and have decided that we need to either live closer or buy a car.  Since buying a car is a fiasco here, we have opted to move closer.  We should be moving August 1^st and will be a 2 minute walk from campus.

We visited a new beach – Red Rock- last weekend and here are some pictures.  It was AMAZING!!

The invitation stands…… Come see us!!!