When my husband and I decided to build a house in Costa Rica there were plenty of things to disagree about during the project.   But one thing we both did agree on: our electrical system would be different from theirs. Electrical service was a fairly new commodity to the residents of the Talamanca region when we first arrived.  Two years before, the government had punched a rough service road through dense jungle from Puerto Viejo to Manzanillo providing the residents with electrical service.  Before that, only those who could afford a generator had power. In 1989 electrical service, although present, was inconsistent at best and smarter people didn't sell off their plants right away.  Food in refrigerators spoiled frequently due to outages that lasted days and sometimes a week or more.  Very often while enjoying an evening of music, or a TV program, the power would close down on us without warning, causing us to fumble about in the dark looking for candles and matches.  Or worse, we would get the three-flash alert to let us know the power would go down in a more organized manner.  The electrical company threw the main switch three times to give us fair warning, and it usually signaled an all-nighter. Rumors circulated about why the electric company would shut it down.  One theory held that it was a method of servicing the major cities because there wasn't enough juice to go around; another asserted it had to do with maintenance on the substation in Limón.  But, far and away, the most widely subscribed to theory was that is was just the government monopoly dicking around with us.  I still don't know the answer. The unorganized blackouts, or those without warning, were almost always attributed to a car running into a power pole up by Wesfalia - a small community outside Limón - some 35 kilometers away.  I have no idea why people felt it should always happen in Westfalia, but I suppose, if it had to happen somewhere, Westfalia was as good a place as any.  With multiple day blackouts we often got word of the cause, news coming to us from anyone who traveled outside.  It never turned out to be a car hitting a power pole up by Westfalia.    The one thing all of us could rely on from our electrical service was an outage when any festivity was scheduled. For many years all residents along this Caribbean coast spent every Christmas and New Year's Eve in the dark. We could almost hear the collective expletive hissing out into the night air as the grid went down. When the power did come back on, it came in a white flash and an accompanying jolt - sometimes two or three in a row.  At almost any gathering someone told a horror story of how a surge of electricity had fried their refrigerator or scrambled the brains of their television.  I once suggested that maybe the electric company should have to pay for the damage.  My Afro- Caribbean friend replied, "What? They's terrible, mon. Chuk...them pay for it? You mus' be jokin'." I bought surge protectors for every appliance we owned.  The first year I remember having power on a New Year's Eve was at the turn of this century.  Newscasts repeatedly predicted that computer binary systems would fail in the face of the new century.  I commented to my husband, "We'll never know if we're experiencing the millennium meltdown everyone is so concerned about, or if we're just having one of our normal blackouts."  We had power that entire night; none of us could believe it. Because this area of Costa Rica had no electrical inspectors or building permits, the locals became their own electricians.  This led to unique methods of wiring a house that I had never encountered before, although I think it was a rudimentary version of the nub and tube system used in North America in the last century.  A typical wiring job consisted of the mother line - one hot one common – that ran down the center of the house from one peak to the other.  No one bothered with a ground wire.  Wherever a branch line was needed they simply cut the insulation around the wires and spliced on, running the new line down the side of the house to an outlet or light fixture.  They wrapped the splice with electrician's tape, which later hung like confetti from the ceiling as the humidity and salt spray loosened the tape.  A simple knife switch in lieu of a breaker box was mounted on the wall.

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When we drove out on the main road we encountered the rare transformer and its accompanying cluster of poles with meter boxes attached. These leaned like drunks from lack of concrete footings to hold the poles straight.  Guy wires ran every which way and a Medusa-head of wires sprouted above the group; individual strands eventually trailed off to houses somewhere back in the bush.

We lived in various rentals before we built our house.  Some of the cabins we stayed in had only basic services, but many boasted hot water as an extra luxury.  There is an item here affectionately known as the Suicide Showerhead.  These contraptions are still made and lots of people use them.  It is essentially a ring of heating elements encased in an oversized round plastic showerhead, directly wired to 120V, and the plumbing. There is a little on/off switch on the plastic housing of the showerhead, and another to adjust the temperature.  The first time I used one I got into the shower and turned the water on.  The heat never came on.  I looked up and saw that the heat had been turned off.  Standing, stark naked in water up to my ankles I pondered my situation and reached tentatively for the switch.  Then logic overcame me and I finished my shower in the cold. 

One cabin we stayed in had such bad wiring that I told my husband at breakfast, after he finished his hot shower in the cold, "Okay, it appears we can take a shower and make coffee, or we can make toast and make coffee, but we cannot take a shower and make toast at the same time."  The aluminum fuses in the knife switch burned like butter on a regular basis.  We kept a pile of them like other people keep matches.

Our landlord came over to solve the problem for us one day.  Forgetting that someone had mounted the knife switch upside down, he was about to delve into the problem with the switch in the 'on' position when my husband cautioned him, "You can go ahead and do that if you want, but you might remember that you are still hooked up to the main."   It took tracing the wires out of the switch up toward the main power line to finally convince him.  His solution to our burned fuses was to replace them with heavy gauge aluminum wire about as big around as my little finger.
"That should do it," he assured us.  We never burned a "fuse" again, but blue flame shot out of the outlet once when I unplugged the toaster. Finally the plug just fused with the outlet, a melted mass of plastic.  We quit having toast after that.
 

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We hauled Romex wiring from North America with every trip we made.  Romex has three insulated copper wires inside a plastic casing and it is heavy.  We packed it in our luggage, relying on the US carrier's allotment of two bags per person at thirty-two kilos (seventy pounds) each.  That's one hundred and nine kilos (two hundred and forty pounds) per trip for the two of us.  We hauled everything that way and we never flew underweight.  I am sure we would be arrested as terrorists today for the things we packed away in the cargo holds of those planes over the years. 

We brought electrical boxes, North American switches and once hauled an item called the Tite-Wad – a main line surge protector that looks like something Osama and his boys might pack in their carry-on luggage.  When I showed it to the check-in attendant at the Continental Airlines desk her eyes bulged.  With just a receipt and the instructions for the item they let it pass.

We now live in a house that is wired to our fussy North American standards.  We have a breaker box with enough circuits to handle the load evenly and appropriately.  We have an on demand hot water heater that delivers piping hot water to our showerhead through the safety of the plumbing system.  It is wonderful, and I never worry about getting shocked.

But the other night, while watching a good movie on television, the lights dimmed to a brownish hue, then flared to bright white, and then died. As I swore to myself and searched for the candles and matches in the dark, I heard my husband's voice, "Seems like a car might have hit a power pole up by Wesfalia." 

Our system might be safer than theirs, but its still out about a third of the time.