Should You Visit Puerto Rico With Delicate Electronics? 

Orlan­do Mer­gal Think­ing Gear
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Today was sup­posed to be a nor­mal day in Puer­to Rico (what­ev­er that might look like). I was sup­posed to record a voiceover for my upcom­ing video and start edit­ing it. Then, after 2–3 days of work, I would write a 2,500 to 3.500-word post for the same loca­tion. After that the cycle would start all over again.

But nor­mal in Puer­to Rico is any­thing but nor­mal, espe­cial­ly when it has to do with del­i­cate elec­tron­ics. So I decid­ed to write this post instead, assist­ed by gen­er­a­tor pow­er and my own volt­age reg­u­la­tors, while the local pow­er util­i­ty takes its sweet time restor­ing the pow­er grid.

Oh, and today is actu­al­ly the sec­ond day in a row. Yes­ter­day we went from 8:00am to 8:00pm with­out pow­er as well.

Puer­to Rico is divid­ed into 78 towns or munic­i­pal­i­ties. Each one has its own tra­di­tions and pecu­liar­i­ties that make it unique. Togeth­er they form a cul­tur­al amal­gam that we like to call Puer­to Rico. But there’s one thing that’s com­mon to all 78. The pow­er sucks!!!

Start­ing 2023 my wife and I decid­ed to vis­it one munic­i­pal­i­ty every two weeks. The goal was to pro­duce a detailed blog post and a video that I would post both on YouTube and on Puer­to Rico By GPS. That isn’t to say that I post my YouTube videos on my blog. That would be a ter­ri­ble mis­take! Instead, I post a copy of the video on YouTube and a sec­ond copy on a pri­vate serv­er that I then post on my blog.

There are sev­er­al rea­sons for that but let’s just say that the main one is traffic.

Before 2023 my wife and I were main­ly focused on the U.S. Nation­al Parks. I had been pub­lish­ing Puer­to Rico By GPS since 2013, but it was more of a hob­by than a seri­ous ven­ture. Our goal at that time was to vis­it every U.S. Nation­al Park in the low­er 48 states. Then Covid-19 hit and we were cut short at 22.

Trav­el blog­gers have spe­cial needs. We trav­el with del­i­cate elec­tron­ics that allow one per­son to do what pre­vi­ous­ly took an entire crew. A typ­i­cal kit can include a lap­top com­put­er, hard dri­ves, SSDs, one or more cam­eras, micro­phones, light mod­i­fiers, lights, lens­es, tripods, slid­ers, gim­bals, drones and —of course— lots and lots of batteries.

If there’s one thing that we can’t live with­out it’s reli­able pow­er. We can either con­sume it at our Airbnb or hotel room, or we can pro­duce it our­selves with renew­able sys­tems. The lat­er is a lot more con­vo­lut­ed but there’s no oth­er way when you go to remote loca­tions like jun­gles, deserts or polar regions.

Well, Puer­to Rico is becom­ing more and more like a remote region or a third world country.

In Puer­to Rico pol­i­tics take prece­dence over every­thing else. You have two main par­ties that have gov­erned the Island since the first half of the 20th cen­tu­ry and a bunch of small­er par­ties that hard­ly gar­ner any power.

One of the main par­ties moved the Island out of pover­ty and turned it into a phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal pow­er­house in a lit­tle over 30 years. The oth­er has spent the last 50 years pri­va­tiz­ing every aspect of life on the Island and dis­man­tling every­thing the pre­vi­ous par­ty did.

There was a time when Puer­to Rico had its own trans­port com­pa­ny, its own phone com­pa­ny, its own air­port, its own roads, its own hos­pi­tal net­work, its own uni­ver­si­ty sys­tem and its own pow­er com­pa­ny. Today each and every one of them is either pri­va­tized or on its way.

Noam Chom­sky

In every case they’ve fol­lowed the same three-step for­mu­la, laid out by Noam Chom­sky years ago. First you defund the enti­ty to make sure that key sys­tems break down and that it doesn’t work. Then the peo­ple get angry. And final­ly you pro­pose “pri­va­ti­za­tion” as the mag­ic bul­let that will “solve” everything.

Well, if there’s some­thing his­to­ry has shown us is that Abra­ham Lin­coln was wrong. Hon­est Abe used to say that “you can fool some of the peo­ple some of the time, but not all of the peo­ple all of the time”. Well, Abe was wrong. These peo­ple have been doing it for close to half a cen­tu­ry in Puer­to Rico.

The lat­est exam­ple has been the Puer­to Rico Pow­er Author­i­ty (PREPA). This was once one of the most envied pub­lic cor­po­ra­tions in Puer­to Rico. Today it has been divid­ed into two sep­a­rate enti­ties (nei­ther of which can get its act togeth­er) and the peo­ple can’t get a straight answer about anything.

On the oth­er hand you hear the Island’s gov­er­nor Pedro Pier­luisi argu­ing about how every­thing is improv­ing and that his gov­ern­ment is “mak­ing things hap­pen, while the peo­ple spend entire days with­out pow­er, their appli­ances keep break­ing down and no one assumes respon­si­bil­i­ty for anything.

I’m going to tell you exact­ly why the elec­tric pow­er is so bad for your del­i­cate elec­tron­ic equip­ment in Puer­to Rico, but first let me address the ques­tion that gave way to this arti­cle. The sim­ple answer is NO!!! You should not vis­it Puer­to Rico with del­i­cate electronics.

And who am I to make such a blan­ket state­ment. Well, for one I’m not an elec­tri­cal engi­neer. How­ev­er, I do hold a master’s degree in com­mu­ni­ca­tions, an under­grad­u­ate course in elec­tron­ics and have been around elec­tron­ic equip­ment since I was a teenag­er back in the 60’s. So I do under­stand a lit­tle bit about these things.

But don’t believe me, accord­ing to a recent study con­duct­ed by J.D. Pow­er and Asso­ciates, the Puer­to Rico Elec­tric Pow­er Author­i­ty recent­ly took last place among 144 U.S. util­i­ties based on six cri­te­ria that include: pow­er qual­i­ty and reli­a­bil­i­ty, price, cus­tomer care and communications.

The data, obtained through inde­pen­dent third par­ty sources, placed PREPA’s over­all cus­tomer sat­is­fac­tion at the very bot­tom of all North Amer­i­can elec­tric util­i­ties, and with a large gap between PREPA and the next low­est-rank­ing util­i­ty. All this accord­ing to a recent arti­cle pub­lished in NimB.com.

THE INNER WORKINGS OF ELECTRIC POWER

So how does the elec­tric pow­er that comes out of your out­let work any­way? Well, with­out going into spe­cif­ic volt­ages and wattages, let’s just say that the pow­er author­i­ty pro­duces some­thing called elec­tric­i­ty. Amaz­ing, I know. That elec­tric­i­ty comes out of a gen­er­at­ing facil­i­ty over wires, goes through a series of trans­form­ers and arrives at your home or office.

Sim­ple enough, right? Well, let’s com­pli­cate it a bit.

Sine Wave

That elec­tric­i­ty is of the AC vari­ety. The let­ters AC mean alter­nat­ing cur­rent and the one in your elec­tric out­let is nor­mal­ly rep­re­sent­ed by a 60Hz sine wave like the one to the right. That sine wave has three com­po­nents: volt­age, fre­quen­cy and phase. Volt­age is rep­re­sent­ed by height of the peaks and val­leys. Fre­quen­cy is rep­re­sent­ed by the amount of peaks and val­leys with­in a giv­en mea­sure of time (in this case sec­onds) and phase has to do with the peaks and val­leys independently.

When your peaks and val­leys vary so does your volt­age. When your volt­age is too high its called a pow­er surge, which can lead to equip­ment over­heat­ing and cause dam­age to del­i­cate cir­cuits. Con­verse­ly, when your volt­age is too low it’s called a brownout and the effects are pret­ty much the same.

In the case of equip­ment that uses elec­tri­cal motors the effects of brownouts can be dev­as­tat­ing. But it gets worse.

AC Rip­ple

Every time there’s a pow­er out­age you get some­thing called “rip­ple”. Rip­ple heat com­po­nents, caus­es noise and dis­tor­tion, and may cause dig­i­tal cir­cuits to oper­ate improp­er­ly. Plus, sys­tems that use bat­ter­ies hate it. That’s why your UPS (unin­ter­rupt­ible pow­er sys­tem, not the guy in the brown shorts) box­es keep break­ing down in Puer­to Rico.

So, how does “rip­ple” actu­al­ly hap­pen? Well, remem­ber those trans­form­ers that I men­tioned a while ago that oper­ate between the pow­er com­pa­ny and your home or office? Those come in two vari­eties: “step up” and “step down”. With­out going into the physics of it, a step up trans­former takes a AC volt­age and aug­ments it, while a step down trans­former does the oppo­site. It takes an AC volt­age and reduces it.

That’s how pow­er com­pa­nies are able to move elec­tri­cal poten­tials across vast expans­es and then bring it down to your com­mon 110 AC at you home or office.

The prob­lem is that every time there’s a pow­er out­age you get rip­ple at the end of the cir­cuit (that’s you and your com­put­er). And just so you know, who­ev­er tells you that a pow­er out­age is the same as throw­ing a switch is sim­ply tak­ing you for a ride!!!

Surge Pro­tec­tor

So let’s see: we have pow­er surges, brownouts, rip­ple and pow­er out­ages. What can a guy do? Well, some peo­ple like to believe that a surge pro­tec­tor (like the ones you find at Home Depot) is going to help in any way. The fact is that it prob­a­bly won’t. Maybe it will iron out a pow­er surge but that’s about it. It won’t pro­tect you against brownouts, rip­ples or pow­er outages.

Volt­age Regulator

The next step up is a volt­age reg­u­la­tor or line con­di­tion­er. Like its name sug­gests a volt­age reg­u­la­tor will take care of surges, brownouts and rip­ples. A good one, that is. Most of them are also heavy, bulky and expensive.

A line con­di­tion­er goes a step fur­ther because it also removes radio inter­fer­ence, sta­t­ic noise and ground fault con­di­tions. Most are expen­sive, heavy and designed to be rack mount­ed. They’re def­i­nite­ly not the kind of thing that you throw in your car­ry-on with you com­put­er and swim­ming shorts. Nei­ther are the regulators.

UPS

Then you have UPS (unin­ter­rupt­ible pow­er sup­ply) box­es. These come in many vari­eties and their prices vary accord­ing­ly. First are the “online” UPS sys­tems. These are sys­tems that are always work­ing. The volt­age goes in one end, it’s con­di­tioned and reg­u­lat­ed and it comes out the oth­er end towards your equip­ment. There’s no switch­ing involved. Your equip­ment is always work­ing from the UPS, not the wall outlet.

Then you have the “offline” UPS sys­tem. Those are the ones that you find at big box stores like Cost­co, Sam’s and Best­Buy. They also have a bat­tery inside but they “switch over” when­ev­er there’s a severe pow­er condition.

So why doesn’t your equip­ment turn off when the pow­er com­pa­ny shuts down? Because the entire oper­a­tion takes place in a mat­ter of microsec­onds and your equip­ment isn’t “fast enough” to detect the change.

The­o­ret­i­cal­ly, both sys­tems should be pret­ty much the same when it comes to pro­tect­ing your equip­ment. And in some cas­es they are. The prob­lem is that the units sold at big box stores are gen­er­al­ly cheap and poor­ly built, so in some cas­es their lev­el of pro­tec­tion is ques­tion­able and they also break down frequently.

I’ve been work­ing at home since 1990 and at any giv­en time have 4 or 5 of those “big box” UPS units around the house. I also have three high qual­i­ty volt­age reg­u­la­tors. The equip­ment in my office is con­nect­ed to two UPS units, which in turn are con­nect­ed into a large volt­age regulator.

The same thing hap­pens with my liv­ing room equip­ment and the equip­ment in my bed room. And still the pow­er com­pa­ny man­ages to blow one or two of my UPS units every year.

They also dam­aged one of my mini split air con­di­tion­ers, my refrig­er­a­tor and one of my GPS units. Just in the last month.

So here’s the bot­tom line. If you val­ue in any way your del­i­cate elec­tron­ic equip­ment don’t lug it over to Puer­to Rico. Leave it home. Instead bring bat­tery oper­at­ed equip­ment. That way, in the worst case sce­nario, they’ll mess up a cou­ple of your batteries.

As a soci­ety, Puer­to Ricans have nor­mal­ized irre­spon­si­bil­i­ty and medi­oc­rity. We’ve nor­mal­ized crime, bad roads, bad hos­pi­tals, bad schools, bad tv, bad parks, bad… well, you get the pic­ture. We’re noth­ing but a per­fumed colony of the Unit­ed States that slow­ly, but steadi­ly, has been los­ing its charm.

On a fun­ny note, when I was get­ting ready to pub­lish this post I went look­ing for pho­tos and illus­tra­tions at one of the image banks that I nor­mal­ly use. The image on the left is from the image bank and the two on the right are from the pow­er lines that go by my back yard.

I rest my case.

©2023,Orlando Mer­gal, MA
____________________

Bilin­gual Con­tent Cre­ator, Blog­ger, Pod­cast­er,
Author, Pho­tog­ra­ph­er and New Media Expert
Tel. 787–750-0000, Mobile 787–306-1590