Yesterday marked an important milestone for us – it was generator day! That’s one of those playa preparation days that rarely gets talked about online and has probably never been a trending topic anywhere… but it is no less important.
Very large camps may rent big generators to cover their needs. More state-of-the-art camps may have gone solar. And much smaller camps may not have power at all. Brainy Bar is somewhere in the middle of all that. We have power. It comes in the form of a gasoline-powered generator. We maintain that equipment ourselves.
That’s where generator day comes in. That’s the day when we give it a nice big shakedown. We blast it out with the air compressor to get at any dust in the nooks and crannies, then we clean the filters, change the oil and the spark plug and check the lines. Then we give it a start and let it run for a while just to make sure everything’s behaving normally. The better shape that a generator is in before it heads out to the playa, the greater the chances that it will run as expected with no surprises.
It was also a good time to check our bike & generator bin to make sure we had extra plugs, oil, and other stuff we might need just in case.
As the camp has evolved and grown, I’m a little surprised at how well our trusty generator has met our needs. I think we owe that to our desire to eventually go solar. Over time we replaced incandescent lights with CFL and eventually LED lighting, and we’ve tried to be mindful of power consumption on other gear.
One more small but important step on our way to Black Rock City!
Brainy Bar 
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