When Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel crooned and harmonised their way into folk music history with “The Sound of Silence”, featuring the now-famous lyrics, “hello darkness, my old friend”, they certainly weren’t singing about load-shedding, but rather solemnly contemplating the existential ennui of city life. And yet, with widespread power outages scheduled for at least the next couple of months, many South Africans will probably be reciting these sombre words to themselves, though it’s unlikely that any of us regard load-shedding as a friend. Instead, it’s an unwelcome and unseemly visitor that has come to disrupt our lives.
Load-shedding can make a person feel a little, well, powerless, and it always seems to strike at the most inopportune times, when you have a looming deadline or the kids have a big project to finish for school. To make matters even worse, you can’t even distract yourself with your favourite series or find comfort in a hot cuppa joe. Instead, you’re left poking around in the dark looking for the candle you bought once long ago and hid away deep in a cupboard where, ironically enough, it’s virtually impossible to find in the darkness. Well, at least you’ll have ambience.
Isn’t it comforting to know that, even if that old familiar chorus of “hello darkness” sounds throughout your neighbourhood, you’ll still be able to use your electric gate up to 35 times if you have the new D5 SMART gate motor installed? With two standby batteries, you get twice as many operations during a power outage, and it’s also fully solar-ready so you can harness the power of the sun for complete power failure autonomy.
As CENTURION R & D mechanical manager Stuart Kirkman explains, “With one’s entrance gate being such an important access point, and therefore integral not only to convenience but also to security, reliability [of the gate motor] is a dominant need. The D5 SMART works off two batteries. We have increased the [battery] standby time, allowing for a greater duty cycle when running on the batteries during a power outage”.
Upgrade to the new D5 SMART today, and feel empowered.
