Show HN: Mac toolbar app to show electricity cutoff schedule

This is stark reminder that we should not take our privileges for granted. We don't think about continuous stream of power through our plugs as a privilege (or at all) but it's not trivial, considering so many might have the latest macbook but not always the power to run it (and to even more people the idea of owning a computer is on the same level as flying to Jupiter).

We had a similar app in Kathmandu. City cut of power to certain zones on an hourly basis, the app helped tracked the powers eventual return and pending cutoff. The amount of activity in the neighborhood when the power comes back on, screams of Batti Aiyo could be heard all around. Turns out it was entirely preventable and that it was all due to an enormous amount of corruption between the Nepalese Energy authority and factories around the country. One guy came into the authority and changed it all for the better and brought all the corruption into the open. Definitely made living here just that much easier.

In my decrepit corner of the third world we call it "loadshedding" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolling_blackout)

It's been a fact of life here as long as I've been alive and there is no indication that it'll improve in my lifetime either.

Even now as I type this there has been no electricity for 1 hour and won't be until another hour. There are about four 2-3 hour blackouts every day throughout the year.

We have always had to schedule every technology-related activity around it. When I was a kid, if there was a blackout during our favorite TV show, we had to go to someone else's house that had electricity or a generator.

We scramble to finish chores that rely on electricity when there's a blackout imminent. Of course there are always random unscheduled blackouts too so you can't really predict them.

Even now in almost 2020, almost every person here has a smartphone and quite a few have Macs etc but we still don't have 24/7 electricity. Almost every middle class house has their own generator and solar/UPS system.

I've never been able to participate in online groups or activities like gaming, collaboration or freelancing for long because of this (on top of unreliable internet too), because I can't expect people in better countries to re-accommodate their schedules around my periods of forced downtime.

"We actually have a whole market of private large generators owners that sell you electricity to mitigate this."

Do they use the existing municipal infrastructure or do they need to lay new cables ???.

We have rotational 2 hourly load shedding on bad days here in South Africa as our state owned power company has no spare capacity and the power stations are old so they tend to break down often.

Our local FTH internet provider discovered the first time that happened after fiber rollout in our area when all their ONT's went online at the same time asking for authentication.

It was clear they never planned for this.

On that note: there are currently massive anti-government protests happening throughout Lebanon, against rampant corruption in the establishment, which is behind the broken electricity sector (amongst others).

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/23/world/middleeast/lebanon-...

Hello from California where we're one of the world's largest economies and still have electricity cutoffs.

Thanks, Pacific Graft and Extortion!

Anyone want to make this work in California with the PG&E schedule?

I needed something like this when I was in India for 5 months! Except there was no generator, so I'd just sleep my laptop when it ran out of battery. At least I didn't try using a desktop.

I was interested in monitoring it at the time, so I wrote SMC voltmeter, an app to measure the input voltage. If you're interested in auto-detecting the power source to your laptop, my open-source code might be useful, so please give it a look!

https://hackaday.com/2015/04/21/reading-analog-values-with-a...

If I lived here, I would fit an Arduino and a bunch of SSR's to my electrical breaker box.

The Arduino would detect use of the generator, and detect load on the generator (with a current clamp), and if the load was too high, start shedding power-hungry devices like electric heaters, driers, ovens, etc.

The order of switch off would be programmable, and some devices like fridges or heaters could be programmed to only run on utility power to save money.

Total hardware cost of $30 would pay for itself quickly in both saved generation bills as well as a better quality of life, and the design/build cost of a few days would easily be recouped by selling devices to all my neighbours.

South Africa also has rolling blackouts every few months. We have apps to notify us when it'll happen on our phones. A lot of us have accepted it as normal by now.

This would have been useful in South Africa if that key assumption "thankfully the cut-off are almost always on schedule" had held.

EDIT: We still have apps though. It's just a mystery sometimes when your power is on and the app says "STAGE 4 LOADSHEDDING [U R SCREWED]" and strangely the power is still on. The converse is more annoying of course.

You could get something like an iotawatt hooked up to your wifi with CT sensors on your mains breaker and get live readings of your power usage as well as "sense" when the power changes from Public to Diesel Gen. https://iotawatt.com/

How does this work? Do you have two feeds into your house, one from the power grid and one from the generator-grid? Did the generator company lay new power lines to every house?

Or do you lease the generator and run it in your garage, but the generator maker somehow bills you for power consumed rather than just running hours?

Fellow Lebanese(-American) here. This is awesome. Thanks for creating and sharing it.

That's akin to a cry out for a Powerwall plus solar panel setup!