There was a planned power outage scheduled from 6AM to 2PM today. My laptop battery can last most of a day if I do a few tweaks to conserve power, so my only concern was internet access since my modem needs power. Of course, if I was home, power wouldn’t be an issue, but I’m not so well equipped in Mexico.
In case TelMex was also down, I made sure last night to buy some data for my phone so I could get internet through Telcel today. I picked their 1GB package good for a week as that would ensure enough bandwidth for the day while not being a huge investment if I ended up not needing it.
The first thing I did today was string an extension cord to the truck from my office window. The power went out at about 6:40, so I plugged my modem into the extension cord, went out to the truck, plugged my inverter into one of the truck’s 12V outlets, and came back in to see if I had internet. I sure did! That was fantastic since it meant that I could keep working from my office instead of having to do so outside with all the mosquitoes! As a reminder, that’s because I only have TelCel internet with a cellular booster, which needs to run off the truck battery as well.
To preserve computer battery life, I left the computer in sleep mode when I wasn’t actually working and instead checked my emails on my phone. This meant that by the time the power came back on at 1:30, I still had 10% computer battery life left (about one hour of run time if I kept it in power saving mode or 30 minutes if I had to work)! If the outage had gone on, I would have used a bit more truck battery capacity to charge my computer, no biggie.
The only thing I would have needed for today to be totally stress-free is small solar trickle charger to keep my truck battery topped up during the day. It’s one of those things I keep forgetting to get because I’m still so used to having everything I own with me at any given time. But I knew that one day of running the modem wouldn’t kill my battery (I mean, I ran my booster for several days when I first arrived), so, really, I wasn’t particularly stressed today.
Those of you who follow me on Facebook know that I did have one power-related emergency today: I forgot while I still had power to grind coffee beans for my second cup of the day. My solution to that was not a joke. I put some beans in a baggie, put a cloth around the baggie, and then put the cloth-wrapped baggie on a smooth rock from my yard. I then used a rounder rock to grind the beans. The cloth kept the rock from going right through the baggie and getting ground beans everywhere. My ‘primitive’ grinder worked perfectly!