2022 Frugal Living Challenge

weenancyinAmerica

I managed to have my first trip to England during the miner's strike. Good timing on my part. 

cw18

Floss said:

cw18 said:

Floss said:

Those of us around my age (late 50s) can likely remember 3-day weeks of the early 1970s and power cuts in the late 70s.

I'm 56, and have absolutely NO recollection of either.

Really? Even if you can't remember the ones in 73/74, I'm surprised you can't remember any powercuts in 1979, the 'Winter of Discontent' - you'd have been around 13.

No - no memories at all.

MazzieD

@London_1 Glad to see you back and looking forward to reading more of your posts.

MazzieD

Any electricity power cuts will have a huge impact on me as apart from all the normal household problems I also work at home and am normally connected to the Internet and work 5 days a week for 7+ hours daily even if not in constant use.  If you have home wifi the router uses electricity.  The power cut rumours have been around for a while so company have already discussed plans in place with me.  Smartphones are great but trying to work on one would be challenging!.  

Floss

MazzieD me too, although I will be able to go into work (an NHS hospital with its own generators in the event of power issues) if necessary.

Although that brings another dilemma - I am considering a new - electric - car, which will need to be charged to get me there 🙄

florianatwobob

I work from home too but for local government. We do have a remote office I can walk to but it could be interesting if we do get power cuts. 

tooldle

As i recall it (I was quite young at the time) the 70's power cut were not for long periods of time. Our area was off at least once each day and the timing rotated so as to spread the impact. I don't recall so much the days, more the late afternoons and evenings. A tin of soup on a camping gas stove by candlelight, for example. If there were to be rationing ahead i would think a similar 'management' would occur so it would be possible to 'charge' batteries ahead of an outage. 

-taff

Primrose said:

The miners went on strike for weeks so no coal was produced and miners pickets were preventing existing coal stocks at depots being  delivered to the generation plants so no electricity could be produced.  I think the strike was partly due to the fact that unproductive and mostly coal mines were being shut down because they had become uneconomic to run.   There wasn,t enough electricity generated  to go round and keep industry and home supplies going so industry was put on a compulsory 3 day week and  domestic premises suffered regular power cuts too.

i worked for a food manufacturer at the time.  The industry was given priority to continue manufacturing so the nation,s food supplies didn,t dry up but that only in the manufacturing area of the factory.   We in the offices had no heating or lighting,  working in overcoats and gloves. We  couldn,t type because all our typewriters were all  electric at the time.

The strike went on for many weeks before the miners eventually gave in and returned to work.

You're mxing up your miners strikes. The 70s was pay, the 80s was Maggie the milk snatcher deciding to break the unions by telling everyone that coal wasunproductive.

And I don't remember any blackouts from the seventies but then, I was only two to ten years old.

annieb64

I can remember walking down the stairs in the Liver building with a torch-that must have been in 1977 or 1978. I'm sure at one time even the street lights went out where we lived in Manchester. 

Didn't the television stop at 10 or 10.30 at one time in the 1970s?To encourage people to go to bed early to save power or am I imagining it?

tooldle

annieb64 said:

I can remember walking down the stairs in the Liver building with a torch-that must have been in 1977 or 1978. I'm sure at one time even the street lights went out where we lived in Manchester. 

Didn't the television stop at 10 or 10.30 at one time in the 1970s?To encourage people to go to bed early to save power or am I imagining it?

You are correct, i think the earlier finish to tv was aimed at spreading the associated surge in demand for power. The finish time was staggered so that one channel would finish before the other and vice versa the following day. Last cuppa before bed etc. 
Now that you mention torches, i remember collecting sibling from cubs using torch light. 

Even in the 90's when i was working for a highly energy intensive manufacturing industry, we would have load shedding in the winter months. In practice this meant all equipment that could be turned off, would be switched off, to reduce demand on the local grid. Our emergency lights only, would be on and we had to sit there doing nothing until the end of the working day. Load shedding normally kicked in around 4pm so we would have 45mins or so to sit it out. The company paid a premium price per unit of electricity in the load shedding period, hence the drive to minimize consumption at those times.