There’s no doubt that load shedding is with us for the foreseeable future, so no doubt you have ensured that you have back up electricity so that you can keep your company running, but have you thought about the knock-on effects?

Having recently experienced them to a small extent I have taken precautions for the future.

1) If there is no electricity, the pumps cannot refill the water reservoirs, so if the situation gets worse, expect to have water shortages as we are already experiencing in Midrand. We have installed a Jojo on the roof and piped it so that the municipal water flows through it. When the municipal supply ceases, we have one Jojo’s worth of water before we run out. The plumbing is really simple.

And if one Jojo is not enough, connect another like this –

2) So that’s one obvious precaution, but what surprised us recently was that our microwave/fibre connection went down. For our office telephones and internet, we have a microwave link to the nearest Vodacom tower and from there it’s fibre to the rest of the world. Great! Until the tower batteries went flat as result of load shedding followed immediately by a fault, no doubt caused by the surge when City Power switched back on. When we set this system up, there was no fibre in our street. We are now checking to see whether that has changed so that we can go to 100% fibre.

3) But that raises another concern. What happens if we go to Stage 6, 7 or 8 and the towers start going down? We’ll have no cell phone connection! The answer is, of course, a satellite phone, but have you seen the prices? So there, I’m stuck. Our only hope is that if this should happen the cell phone service providers’ income would tank, so one would expect them to prepare for this and install better backup power, at least in the urban areas.