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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,815,14,635,814,9,3,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4744","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-homemaking","category-mazatlan","category-mexico","category-north-america","category-sinaloa","category-tech","category-travel","category-work"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.raecrothers.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4744","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.raecrothers.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.raecrothers.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.raecrothers.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.raecrothers.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4744"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.raecrothers.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4744\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.raecrothers.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4744"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.raecrothers.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4744"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.raecrothers.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4744"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}