You are not alone feeling like that. I am also afraid to use my embroidery machines due to power surges. I have allready blown both motherboards at great cost to me.

I have been lucky, no power outages at all for the last three weeks! I'm not telling you where in Pretoria I live. Being close to the Union Buildings does help I suppose.

So sorry Sarah about your power cuts. I do hope they can come to some arrangement so that it will be managed properly. I make sure to always use a power surger. Love Chris

Sarah thinking of you dear

Same in Pretoria....not good when you're halfway stitching...I'm to scared to start a project.

Sarah, I'm sending you all of my extra kilowatts and wishes for lots of patience. It's not my extra patience as I seem to have forgotten where I put that.

What a nightmare for you all and makes you realise how we all depend now on electric, even the shops, so must be a nightmare for them too and the whole economy. Mind you even the UK is under threat, do not live there at the moment but also purely through government not acting to build new power stations and EU directives to shut old ones down, might this be a possibility in the future.

So sorry to hear this...we are looking to add solar panels to our roof...they will generate enough energy that we will have a surplus to sell back to the power company...

Really bad. I agree if they would only stick to the schedule we can manage. We installed a generator during the week (as we can not afford to let our security systems run out of battery power - our area is one of the worst crime spots in Gauteng at the moment with armed robberies almost daily) but I am not comfortable using my electronic equipment. Luckily our cuts are now during day time.

For sure this not a nice situaton. Is there a reason why you have so many power cuts ? Here in Belgium we got the annoucement that this winter we will have also power cuts. Because on of our power centrals is down. For the moment there is no problem, because we do not have a real cold winter yet. If when it starts it will give problems. Ther only difference is that they will power down at dedicated times and in dedicated towns. not sure yet if we will be affected

It is just as bad here in Durban!! I am too scared to start embroidering the gifts that I have planned. What a waste of time due to mismanagement and non-caring people.

You may want to invest in a Universal Power Supply. A good one will allow you time to safely save, get to a stopping point and prevent damage to your sewing machine or computer.

Your are not alone, I live in Boksburg. Lost my computer and everthing on it. I am toooooooo scard to start doing any enbroidery or sewing

That is not good. I was reading another post about using a UPS, which I think is Universal Power Supply, which can let you embroider and if there is an outage, you can get to a place in your embroidery to stop the machine safely.

I totally support your sentiments, our power cuts do also not correspond with the so called schedule issued by our local authority, with the result that I am too scared to start on a large project. I am sure most of us South Africans feel the way you do, we have also lost a computer due to the power issues. What a waste!! Best of luck to all fellow cuties stuck in the dark.

I went off to the electricity department this morning and have got a schedule which is in three stages. At least it gives me some idea when we might be off. No power cuts today so I actually made myself a shirt.

These stops and starts can be very hard on motors such as fridge, freezer.
I hate the outages..most especially resetting all the clocks in all the appliances!