Electricity for our land
Donation protected
Help us get electricity installed at our land.
My 64 year old mother and I live on a five acre plot of land in a colonia out in El Paso County. It's all we can afford for a monthly payment -- $200 a month -- but that means going without utilities except for what we can gimcrack on our own. We hire a portapotty service for our bathroom, haul water five gallons at a time for cooking/drinking/bathing, and have a small solar setup to charge our phones when the sun is out.
We've been living like this for going on four years now, and it has become very obvious that saving for the $2,000 deposit + other expenses for an electricity install is out of our reach. My income is trivial, dependant on a fledgling self-publishing career that hasn't taken off yet and my mother's disability checks.
Any funds we manage to put aside end up being used for car repairs -- the latest being new rims on two of the wheels, and the time before that the brake system having to be rebuilt -- or health expenses. My mother had four strokes in less than five months in 2014, and while she has recovered enough to function on a day-to-day basis, she's disabled out of work and I fear our living conditions has contributed to her ongoing health issues.
With electricity at the land, we can have heat in the winter and power fans in the summer. We can cook on electric burners instead of using a camp stove that requires expensive propane bottles. We can have light at night without relying on $0.99 solar lights to charge in the day.
The breakdown in expenses to get electricity installed, in order of need:
$550 for the pole drop.
$2000 for the deposit with the electrical company to prove we won't have them put up a transformer out in the middle of nowhere and then leave (this was apparently an issue in the past, thus the deposit?)
+ the rest of the funds going for wiring, conduit, and a transformer box to install on the outside of the wooden shed we're hoping to get electricity to.
Any help will be extremely appreciated in this. We've been living like this for years, and would really like to live like quasi-normal people again in the future.
My 64 year old mother and I live on a five acre plot of land in a colonia out in El Paso County. It's all we can afford for a monthly payment -- $200 a month -- but that means going without utilities except for what we can gimcrack on our own. We hire a portapotty service for our bathroom, haul water five gallons at a time for cooking/drinking/bathing, and have a small solar setup to charge our phones when the sun is out.
We've been living like this for going on four years now, and it has become very obvious that saving for the $2,000 deposit + other expenses for an electricity install is out of our reach. My income is trivial, dependant on a fledgling self-publishing career that hasn't taken off yet and my mother's disability checks.
Any funds we manage to put aside end up being used for car repairs -- the latest being new rims on two of the wheels, and the time before that the brake system having to be rebuilt -- or health expenses. My mother had four strokes in less than five months in 2014, and while she has recovered enough to function on a day-to-day basis, she's disabled out of work and I fear our living conditions has contributed to her ongoing health issues.
With electricity at the land, we can have heat in the winter and power fans in the summer. We can cook on electric burners instead of using a camp stove that requires expensive propane bottles. We can have light at night without relying on $0.99 solar lights to charge in the day.
The breakdown in expenses to get electricity installed, in order of need:
$550 for the pole drop.
$2000 for the deposit with the electrical company to prove we won't have them put up a transformer out in the middle of nowhere and then leave (this was apparently an issue in the past, thus the deposit?)
+ the rest of the funds going for wiring, conduit, and a transformer box to install on the outside of the wooden shed we're hoping to get electricity to.
Any help will be extremely appreciated in this. We've been living like this for years, and would really like to live like quasi-normal people again in the future.
Organizer
Sinéad Malloy
Organizer
El Paso, TX