The trouble with living in a remote area is that the local council tends not to care about you. We’ve had several days with no power and no phones because lines were broken. When they said they’d have power off all day while they did maintenance work, with only a few hours notice, it was the last straw, and we took matters into our own hands. My dad ordered a diesel powered, 15hp, 140v, single-phase generator that can power the entire house. Yesterday, it arrived.

The delivery was a story in itself. We bought the generator over the internet (you can see where this is going…) with no clue as to how big it was or how much it weighed. On second thought, that may have been an oversight. Anyway, on the morning of the delivery a truck pulls up, and a confused-looking Lebanese fellow steps out and explains that he doesn’t have our generator, and that it’s coming in a “beeeg truck” with a forklift to get it out. A forklift? Just how big is this thing? Furthermore, he explained that the truck likely would not fit in our driveway (which is a fairly big driveway!), and that we would have to unload the generator in the street and wheel it in. Huh? We ordered a nice, mid-sized generator to power the house during outages, not a freaking apartment block.

An hour later, a tiny truck pulls up (our mailman’s van is seriously bigger), and what do you know, it has our generator. So much for huge trucks and forklifts. We got the generator out, and although it’s a decent size (about as big as a small fridge) it was far smaller than the Lebanese guy had made out. This was a relief to us, as we have about 1 meter of free space in our garage and it was nice to have somewhere to store it.

We’re really happy with the thing so far. It’s quite similar to a car engine, in that it has a battery and you can start it by turning a key (no yanking on a pullstring) and since it runs on diesel it will save us money too.