Making Meralco unhappy

Today’s column.

If you have been following the developments on the Manila Electric Co. saga, three very substantial questions are worth pondering over. First, what really is the agenda of Government Service Insurance System in its seeming attempt to wrestle control of Meralco? Second, is Meralco trying to evade answering the “syndicated estafa” charges by resorting to cheap legal techniques like seeking dismissal for non-payment of docket fees? Third, what really happens to the deposits that new customers are required to pay?

We recently moved houses and, relative to our application for a power subscription, the subdivision developer informed us that Meralco no longer required a deposit. Whether that was because the house had an existing line and we were only applying for a new meter, I did not know. Suffice to say that we don’t need to shower Meralco with more money that can be put to better use.

However, there is the issue of the deposit we paid when we applied for a power subscription in our old house. Well, we’re about to find out if the deposits that customers pay are actually in the nature of a license or a donation, aren’t we? When we submit to Meralco a letter to terminate the service in the old house, we will know if the deposit will be applied to the last bill, if we will get a refund of the excess or whether we will be told to kiss it goodbye. And YOU will know because I will tell you what happens, whether we get dealt with fairly or whether Meralco dishes out crap to us.

Meanwhile, we want to make Meralco unhappy by consuming as little electricity as we can in our new house. No more air conditioners. The house was designed for maximum natural ventilation and since we live in hilly Antipolo, we don’t sweat as much as you city dwellers do even in the summertime. We get fog too during the rainy season when all you get is smog.

Aside from ditching the aircon, how else do we intend to keep power consumption down? By lighting candles during dinnertime, walking to the market everyday so there’s no need for a refrigerator, going back to dial-up Internet connection and taking cold showers everyday? Hardly. You might not realize it but lights can be a tremendous power gobbler. I wrote something about it in my Web log a couple of days ago and let me just reproduce that here.

…if the neighbor’s little boy has been telling an accurate story, the previous owners gave it [the house] up because they could no longer pay the electric bill and Meralco cut off their power line. Boy, oh boy, when Speedy [my husband] first heard that about a week before we were due to move in, I thought he was going to call the whole thing off. It’s like his knees buckled from beneath him and he sat on the sidewalk beside the clubhouse and broke in cold sweat. His response, of course, was to get rid of most of the halogen lamps that the previous owners seem to have been fond of and install those energy-saving lights. He had long and very detailed discussions with the electricians, believe me. The little boy’s story upset him so.

Energy-saving lights mean compact fluorescent lamps or CFLs. We’re been evangelists of CFLs for over a decade. And now that they are available in different hues, they are no longer an interior designer’s nightmare. For instance, if you want a warm fuzzy glow in the living room, then get warm white, instead of cold white, CFLs. There is a CFL for just about every effect you want to achieve.

What we didn’t count on was the threat of mercury exposure. I recently received a press release from the EcoWaste Coalition and my eyes grew wide with shock. I was happy enough to note that in the hospital (I had gall bladder surgery in May), old-fashioned mercury thermometers had been ditched in favor of digital thermometers which were already the standard. Quite shocking to learn that right inside our own home, the mercury threat is there. Worse, the potential exposure to mercury is heightened because we want to cut down on power consumption.

Isn’t that insane? We want to cut down on power consumption to save money and to show a little more TLC toward the environment, and the payback is potential exposure to a neurotoxin and horrendous hospital and medical bills should we contract some illness because of the exposure? Sounds like trading one BS (note: the original manuscript says “bullshit”; my desk editor censored it) for another.

The good news is that CFL usage, per se, is not hazardous. “CFLs, according to the EcoWaste Coalition, poses two key problems that consumers need to be conscious about: First, the risk of being exposed to mercury if CFL bulbs at home or work are broken. Second, the risk of the environment being contaminated with mercury from the disposal of spent CFL bulbs in dumps. The anti-dumping group notes that in some places, like in California, USA, the disposal of CFLs in waste bins has been outlawed since 2006.”

Duly noted. For the record, my husband has put back spent CFLs back into their boxes and kept them in storage. What I would like to know is where we’re supposed to bring them. Garbage segregation? It hasn’t been implemented in Antipolo.

Meanwhile, shouldn’t the government be educating us on how to properly dispose of CFLs in conjunction with the Energy Department’s SWITCH movement that’s meant to phase out incandescent bulbs by the end of 2009? I mean, who would we be saving money and the environment for if we’re all going to die from mercury exposure, right?

In the archive

• Back to school, part 2
• The relevance of homework
• Halloween and All Saints’ Day
• My bucket list
• Exploiting poverty
• At the Blanco Family Museum
• Investment lessons
• Overacting
• Entertain me
• Why mothers kill