With power cuts and the heat intensifying, many schools and colleges have started buying diesel generator sets in the city and suburbs.
Generator dealers say that their phones keep ringing with enquiries from educational institutions, big apartment complexes and small business establishments.
Usually residences and small business establishments use 10 KVA – 50 KVA capacity generator sets and between 50 KVA to 500 KVA are used by big industries and apartment complexes. “This time we are getting more enquiries from educational institutions,” said a generator dealer from Anna Salai.
Lakshmi Srinivasan, principal of P.S. Senior Secondary School, said that they had purchased two generators and were in the process of installing it.
“We have been facing the two-hour power cuts for the past few years. Though we have back up facility in the labs, children get restless in the class rooms when there is a power cut. The generators will be used for the proper functioning of smart board,” she said.
M. Kumar, head of department of the Jaya Engineering College’s computer science department said that they had already procured a generator set. Since the college was in suburban Tiruninravur they faced more than five hours of outages.
“We have UPS for the computer lab. For the rest we use generator set. We have recently installed wall-mounted fans in our office and labs as we don’t run air conditioners using generators,” he said.
S. Salivahanan, principal of S.S.N. Engineering College, said they had also purchased a generator for their labs. A private arts and science college in the city has enquired about a 180 KVA generator.
“There are unscheduled power cuts and the students kept complaining they were feeling sleepy due to the sweating. Hence we enquired about the cost of generator sets,” said a college staff.
While the city has only two hours of load shedding, it faces unscheduled power cuts too. In the suburbs, the unannounced power cuts are frequent.
“Last year we sold at least 100 equipments between April and November. This year it is slowly increasing,” said L. Christudas, partner of Ads Hi Power Systems that deals with generators.
