GADGET THAT CAN SAVE LIVES
November 8th 2009 00:00
Hold on fellas! Before you bat those eyelashes or raise those eyebrows, give me some room here, ok? And please, let’s try to lower our expectations… I may be exaggerating a bit, but then again, maybe I am not.
First, here’s a statement of fact. This country, the Philippines, has just been battered by a series of killer typhoons. I mentioned two of them in my other blog here in Orble and those two were immediately followed by two more - both with gustiness of around 200kph or more.
At the very least, those typhoons inundated villages, brought landslides, toppled power lines, and as had been reported by traditional media - print, radio and TV- killed people (I believe super typhoons or hurricanes do the same things everywhere else.)
I was lucky to be out of harms way in a number of those instances but I found myself right in the path of the last one (Typhoon Marinae?) locally known as “Santi” when it veered West South-West from it’s original track. It has relatively weakened when it reached our place but it still cut the power supply in our area for a couple of days!
Well, you know what happens when there’s no supply of electricity and you don’t have a power generator. You are thrown into darkness at night and it is like you are back to stone age at daytime. No TV, no computers, no radio (unless you still have one that runs on dry cell batteries), no air-conditioning, no refrigerators, no microwave ovens, no water pumps, no electric fans, etc., etc…
And, if you are a heavy user, you’ve probably ran-out of cell phone batteries as well.
This is where the gadget that I am referring to would come in – its usefulness will depend on what you need (or perceived that you need) the most under the circumstances. If what you require are simple amenities in life, then, that’s probably all it can give you.
It can make you watch free-airing television, listen to a radio station, power up your electric fan, make you work on your computer to meet a deadline or something… save you a job and so on and so forth…
But consider a situation wherein you are caught in between landslides, or a landslide and a collapsed bridge in the middle of nowhere – you can’t go either way of the road. The typhoon that is still raging loved your area so much it doesn’t want to get out, a rampaging flood is on the way, the power lines are down and you have a family member that depends on a very efficient medical equipment that runs on a rechargeable battery that you need to recharge soon – but there is no supply of electricity!
Thank God that was not the situation I found myself in, but like most everyone else whose life almost practically freezes when the power supply stops, my days without power needed a little cranking up.
So, I dashed to the nearest mall (which of course has its own gigantic generator set) and bought myself an inverter. That tiny little box that can be attached to a car battery or cigarette lighter that converts 12 volts of electricity to a 60 hertz 220 volts. I looked for one that has at least 500W of load capacity but they were all gone so I settled for 150W capacity.
Power Inverter
That can’t power up most of our house appliances and electronic gadgets, but it was enough to give life to my 28W flat screen TV and enable me to watch the news and the weather. It has two outlets, so while waiting for weather alerts, I started charging my drained mobile phone battery…
After learning from the news that the world is still pretty much as I have known it, except for some destructions caused by the super typhoon, I unplugged the TV and replaced it with that of my laptop to finish some overdue reports. With paper works done and my mobile phone battery fully charged, I felt my life starting to go back to normal…
I can use the phone again to call the authorities in cases of emergency, I can call the office 120 kms away to check if there are still things that needed to be done, I can send my reports via the internet using my mobile phone as a modem and a host of other things…
And guess what, I can use my submersible with it to pump clean rainwater (not for drinking) I caught in a couple of drums from the drainpipes inside the house. Uh, I live in a subdivision which sources its water supply from a deep well. They pump it into a huge water tank using electricity so…
Sure, that small gadget will not be able to carry the power loads that an ordinary household often requires, but hey, I only paid an equivalent of $15 US for that!
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