During my fifteen plus years of living in Costa Rica, I have always wondered why the Electric Company (Fuerza y Luz) regularly schedules general maintenance of electric cables, transformers, poles, etc., where entire neighbourhoods are left without electric power for periods of eight hours, or more (It is useful that notice of such power outages is published in a newspaper beforehand).
In Canada, I don’t recall anything similar happening for reasons of performing general routine maintenance. Yes, possibly a few minutes of electric power interruption, but nothing like eight hours.
In fact, our office messenger, who is Nicaraguan, has a brother who works for the Nicaraguan Electric Company equivalent of Fureza y Luz and apparently, they do not follow the same procedure for general routine maintenance as does Costa Rica. Except for very brief periods, the electricity flows to the customers while the maintenance is being performed.
Logically, I understand that it is a very safe procedure for the Electric Company workers to do the maintenance without live electric power running through the apparatus that you are maintaining. Apparently other jurisdictions have a plan worked-out where this work can be done safely with electric power being supplied simultaneously to the customers.
I consider this interruption in electric service to be an unnecessary problem to support, which to support in a home is bad enough, but the effect on a business can be economically devastating.
