Load shedding, generators and water

Published

This is the single most consequential local question, and the one most often left until it is too late to change venue.

What can actually fail

When the grid drops, a venue loses lighting, sound, kitchen equipment, refrigeration, water pumping if it is borehole-fed, and often the card machine at the bar. Any one of these can reshape an evening.

The questions, in order

  1. Do you have a generator? If the answer is anything other than a plain yes, treat the venue as unpowered.
  2. What does it actually run? Many generators cover lights and sockets but not kitchen equipment or air conditioning. Ask for the list, not the reassurance.
  3. How long can it run, and who refuels it during the event?
  4. How long is the changeover? A ten-second gap is a pause. A two-minute gap in the middle of speeches is remembered.
  5. Where is it sited? A generator audible from the ceremony is a problem you cannot fix on the day.
  6. Is there an inverter or battery system as well? These cover the changeover gap and the smaller loads.
  7. Is generator fuel included in the quote or billed after? It is frequently billed after.

Suppliers need power too

Your caterer, your band and your photographer all assume power exists. Tell them the venue's actual position rather than letting them find out. A band with no backup plan and a two-hour outage is a silent reception.

Refrigeration is the load most often left off a generator and the one with the worst consequences. At an unserviced site the caterer's whole operation depends on it, as catering at remote and unserviced sites sets out, and the question to ask is blunt: are the fridges on the generator?

There is a less obvious casualty. Mobile base stations run on mains power with battery backup, so signal itself degrades during long or repeated outages — which takes out the card machine, the group chat and the way your suppliers reach each other. Mobile coverage and the backup plan covers what to arrange instead.

Water

Ask whether the venue is on municipal supply, borehole or tanked water, and what happens under a restriction notice. Confirm that lavatories and the kitchen both remain functional.

A venue on borehole with no generator loses water when it loses power. The two questions are connected and should be asked together, and water supply, storage and restrictions sets out the storage figures that separate a resilient site from a hopeful one.

Reading a generator answer properly

Venues answer the generator question willingly, and the answers are frequently more optimistic than the equipment. Three habits separate a real capability from a reassuring one.

Ask for the rating and compare it with what has to run. A unit sized for lights and a fridge will not carry an induction hob, an urn and air conditioning simultaneously, and the failure mode is not a dimming of lights but a trip halfway through service. If the venue does not know its rating, that is itself the answer.

Ask when it last ran under load. A generator started monthly for five minutes is a generator that has never been tested against a real evening. Ask whether it has carried a full event this season.

Ask who is on site. A machine that needs manual starting, refuelling or resetting is only as good as the person who knows how, and that person is often not working on a Saturday night unless someone arranged it.

Building your own fallback

Whatever the venue says, a small number of independent arrangements make an outage survivable rather than memorable.

Battery-powered lighting for the ceremony and the walkways costs little and removes the worst of the risk, because darkness is what turns an inconvenience into a hazard on unfamiliar ground. A band or DJ with a battery-backed PA, or simply an acoustic contingency, keeps the evening running through a changeover. Cash accepted at the bar removes the card machine from the critical path.

And someone other than you should hold the plan. Name a person — the coordinator, a supplier, a capable relative — who knows where the torches are, who to call and what happens next. The failure on the night is rarely the outage itself; it is that everybody looks at the couple.

Why this belongs before aesthetics

None of this is visible on a tour, none of it appears in photographs, and all of it decides how the evening actually goes.