Minutiae of living

When we came back to Afghanistan, we had long list of necessary equipment for dark and cold wintertime. We started out with looking for generator, inverter and stoves as urgently needed items. And our list ends with things for entertainment like guitar, Sat-TV and exercise machine.
And, of course, we started from the easiest end. We bought the only exercise machine what seems to be too strong enough not to crumble the first day. And we got satellite-TV: for four dollars per month we can see channels as BBC, CNN, Discovery etc.
We bought the radiotelephone too. Now there is possibility to have dial-up internet connection using Afghan Telecom. Connection seems to be tricky: I need to move the radiotelephone quite a lot because of the poor signal caused by metal mosquito net in the front of the windows.
Far more serious is electricity business. We bought a little inverter (700 W) with one battery (100Ah), which is enough to keep my laptop and telephone working during daytime.
There is city power for some hours in the evening and in the early morning around two o’clock (because Moslems have to eat before sunrise during Ramadan). Our landlord supplies our house with the electricity during the remaining evening hours in the late evenings. He has a inverter with ten batteries which are powerful enough to have lights. But we can switch on our refrigerator or water heater only when there is city power.
We don’t like the generators – not us, but our landlord as well. But is seems there is no choice. There is less and less electricity with every day and soon there will be no possibility to charge our inverters.
Yesterday we visited Kim to see her alternative solar energy system. She has two solar panels on the roof (a 75 W) connected with batteries (7*100 Ah) and a 2-KW inverter. She has the transformer which switches automatically between solar or city or generator power. The system is good enough to provide lighs and refrigerator. Only the water heater can’t be run by this solar power.
We liked the solar system a lot, but the cost is too high, ca 4000 dollars. For the unstable country like Afghanistan there is always the question of balance.