What do you need in the way of essential services (“utilities”) from the community? Water, electricity, telephone, postal service and sewage and rubbish disposal come to mind, and nowadays I'd say that “telephone” must include an Internet connection.

Of these, we don't have too many. We supply our own water and there's no sewage disposal (we use a septic tank instead). Still, we're doing better than in our previous house in South Australia, where in addition we had to pick up mail from the post office 5 km away and rubbish was removed by an independent contractor. I've discussed my concerns with telephone and network connections elsewhere, but one thing that hasn't changed after moving house is that we also have a less-than-adequate electricity supply.

The problems we have are mainly short power failures, less than a few seconds. We have a surprising number of electrical devices that are connected to the power all the time, and which require attention when the power goes away even briefly:

• The most obvious category are our computers. At the moment we have ten machines which run all the time. In fact, they recover quite well from a power failure, but of course any programs running before the failure have to be restarted.

  We've solved this one by putting them all on uninterruptible power supplies (UPS). But see below.

• In the kitchen, we have two microwave ovens and a conventional oven, all with clocks which need resetting when the power goes away.

• We have two video recorders and a DVD recorder. The video recorders usually weather a short outage well, but the DVD recorder doesn't.

• In the bedrooms we also have electric clocks that don't have battery backup.

So after every brief outage we have to go into the kitchen and reset three clocks, and into the bedrooms and reset another two. Total time about 10 minutes (you have to wait a minute for each clock so that the seconds are in synchronization).

Longer outages

If the power goes away and doesn't come back within about 10 seconds, it's probably going to be away for two hours. This is what I've called the “possum outage”: a possum walks along an overhead power line and across an insulator, turns to charcoal and shorts out the power. It takes about 2 hours to find it and clean the insulator. Since moving to Victoria, this kind of problem seems less common.

Power surges

A good UPS should handle voltage fluctuations, not just power outages. They're very varied in the way the handle this situation. On numerous we've had what must have been very strong overvoltages, and they've destroyed lots of equipment, about 8 UPSs alone. I recently bought a UPS that displays mains voltage, which confirms that the fluctuations can be extreme. The Australian Standards allow up to 253 V (230 V +10%), but we frequently see voltages as high as 257 V.

Outage statistics

I've noted power failures from time to time, but I haven't kept formal records. Starting on 18 March 2007 I'm keeping statistics, first for ETSA in South Australia and since 7 July 2007 for Powercor.