Waiting for power

Still unresolved. Written on 30 September 2026, with no connection yet and a promise of one in the second week of October. We will keep adding to this entry until there is power on the plot.

It took one day to find water three hundred and twenty-five feet under this plot. It has now taken nearly three months to get a wire to it, and we still do not have one.

That sentence is the most honest summary of house-building we have written so far. The physical work has been the easy part. Everything that has genuinely cost us time has been paper.

Why a temporary connection matters more than it sounds

It is tempting to treat electricity as something you sort out near the end, along with the light fittings. It is not. A construction site needs power from more or less the first day, and for this house in particular:

• The borewell pump. We have water at 310 feet. Without power we cannot lift a drop of it. A borewell without a pump is an expensive hole that you own.
• Compaction. Rammed earth is built by compacting each lift, and doing that at any pace means pneumatic rammers, which means a compressor, which means real power. Hand ramming works — it is how this was done for centuries — but it is dramatically slower, and slower means more months of everything else.
• Mixing. Getting a consistent earth mix by shovel across a whole house is not realistic.
• The ordinary things. Cutting, drilling, welding, lighting when work runs past dusk, charging everything.

The alternative to a connection is a diesel generator, and we could run one. But it is expensive per hour, it is loud, and there is an irony in it we would rather avoid: this is a house being built partly because earth barely costs the planet anything to turn into a wall. Burning diesel for a year to compact it undoes a respectable share of the point.

What actually happened

We started chasing this the same week the borewell was drilled, in early July.

Since then we have been through contractor after contractor across Bengaluru — the people whose entire business is walking applications like ours through the distribution company. Some looked at it and declined immediately. Some took the details, went quiet, and came back weeks later to say it could not be done. A couple were confident right up until they were not.

Nearly all of them failed. One, finally, has taken it on and promised a connection by the second week of October.

We will believe it when the meter is on the pole.

The reason we were given

Every one of them came back with the same explanation: a restriction on new connections for properties above 1,200 square feet. Under that size, we were told, this is routine. Above it, a new connection runs into rules that most of them either could not navigate or did not think worth their time.

A caveat, stated plainly. We have not yet seen this rule in writing. What we have is the same answer from a lot of different people who do this for a living, which is evidence of something but is not the same as having read the clause. We are still trying to get the actual regulation in front of us, and we will update this entry when we do. If you know the specific provision, we would genuinely like to hear from you — and if we have it wrong, we would like to know that even more.

What we can say with confidence is the lived version: if your plot is on the larger side, do not assume a construction power connection is a formality.

What we would do differently

Start this before you start anything else.

We began the process in the same week as the drilling, which felt early and was not. If we were doing it again, the application for a temporary connection would go in before the borewell, before the soil test, before anything that happens on the ground — because those things take days, and this one takes months, and there is no reason they cannot run in parallel.

That is the actual lesson here, and it is not about electricity. It is that the critical path through a house is rarely the part you are worrying about. We spent our attention on soil and water, which were resolved in a day each. The thing quietly eating the calendar was a connection nobody thinks to plan for.

Where this stands

We will update this entry as it moves. If it slips again, that will be written here too.