Terry Mackenzie-hoy

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Terry Mackenzie-hoy

Mackenzie-Hoy is a consulting acoustics and electrical engineer – machoy@iafrica.com

Protecting your house

6th August 2021 I was asked by a concerned citizen if it was okay to protect your house or property with an electric fence. Now, this is a very dangerous question: if I gaily said, yes, no problem, then it is possible that the person asking would end up killing somebody and the defence offered would be that a... →

Working from home

30th July 2021 Before I started this consulting practice in 1993, I had, like many, worked at other businesses. In general, I started work at some time between 07:30 and 08:30, had a tea break and a lunch break and finished at 16:30 or 17:00. Before and after work, there was a drive in traffic which, depending... →

Oh ancient art

23rd July 2021 About 50 years ago, I was at the Department of Internal Affairs in Johannesburg. I had waited for about two hours to be processed so as to be issued with a South African identity document. I had filled out the forms, I had the photos, I had my birth certificate. At the counter, the clerk looked... →

Moral responsibility

16th July 2021 I wrote two pieces for this column in which I stated that, in my experience, the Department of the Environment, Forestry and Fisheries (DEFF) does not answer phone calls or reply to emails and that the DEFF doing something useful is an exception rather than a rule. Now I can take that back. Or at... →

An obscure profession

9th July 2021 Some may know that I trade as an acoustics engineer, not a ‘sound engineer’. As I recently reminded an attorney – the ‘sound engineer’ chews gum, has piercings and tattoos, wears dark glasses at night and operates a sound-mixing desk in a theatre. An acoustics engineer designs the acoustics and... →

Driving through the gap

2nd July 2021 Back in the day, consulting engineering firms were making money hand over fist. There were no black consulting engineers. Government handed out projects on a rota system. Fees were based on a percentage of contract value, so there was no incentive for consulting engineers to design anything... →

The carpetbaggers

25th June 2021 New people on the block, hoping to make a quick buck, were once named carpetbaggers. The term originated from the carpet bags (a form of cheap luggage made from carpet fabric) which many of these newcomers carried. The term came to be associated with opportunism and exploitation by outsiders.... →

Shoot the poor

18th June 2021 So there’s this film, see? A big mining company wants to dump mine tailings in a river. They’re keeping it all hush hush. But a brave and fearless person manages to find out their devious plan. The brave and fearless person finds secret documents which show that the dumping plan will pollute the... →

Aw, Snap!

11th June 2021 Wind turbines do not assist power system operation. They do not. Every so often, a power system collapses and it is the renewable-energy systems which cause the collapse. Wind turbines produce no power when there is no wind. Solar power systems are better but not at night time. This is blindingly... →

Refurbishing a crane

4th June 2021 Large cranes have many moving parts and quite complex systems. In general, travelling cranes supplied over the past 30 years have a driver who sat high up in a cabin. In the cabin are the levers and controls that link the crane operating components, which are, but not limited to, the following:... →

Chattanooga Choo Choo

28th May 2021 “Okay, children, I’ll tell you a story. Once upon a time, there was this place at the mouth of the Orange river, on the border of South Africa. At this place, there were diamonds on the ground, lots. So people began to collect the diamonds, and after a while a mine was started, and it was called... →

Energy costs spiral dive

21st May 2021 Professor Renfrew Christie wrote a book titled Electricity, Industry and Class in South Africa. This is a highly recommended book, especially for anybody interested in the, um, anthropology of electrification. In 1988, when I was working for State-owned power utility Eskom, it had just emerged... →

Cuban sanitation engineers

14th May 2021 We try to stay away from politics in this column. But. Und zis iz a big ‘but’. →

Welcome to Earth

7th May 2021 “Good morning and welcome to Earth. I know it’s been a long trip, but I am sure you are all excited to have finally arrived. I am going to answer some of your questions, some general and some about your new home, which, to remind us all, is at a location known as the Kalahari, in an area known as... →

A missed call from you

23rd April 2021 Back in the day, as they say, Harden Beck, of the East London municipality, was the chief electrical engineer. I found out that the electrical engineering department of the city received many letters from the public. Harden recorded each letter and made sure that they were all answered. Moving... →

All in a day’s work

16th April 2021 We were at Richards Bay Minerals, getting a safety briefing. The safety officer explained: “Hey, we’ve got 14 types of snake here. Of these, 12 types are venomous, which is to say, if you get bitten, their poison will kill you. Of the 14, we have antiserum for six of them. For the rest, if you... →

Turkish power delight

9th April 2021 Gwede Mantashe is a South African politician who served as the national chairperson of the African National Congress (ANC). He is also a former chairperson of the South African Communist Party and a former secretary-general of the ANC. And he is the Minister of Mineral Resources and Energy. If I... →

Free, free at last!

2nd April 2021 What is a fact is that many people think that being off the grid, independent from Eskom, is very much more desirable than being connected to the grid. What is also a fact is that many people do not understand the simple basic fact that Eskom (when not load-shedding) is 90% reliable, while any... →

I’d like world peace, please

26th March 2021 It is a stock joke: every contestant in the Miss World contest is asked what she hopes for and the answer is, among other answers: “I’d like world peace . . .” It’s easy to mock. Sexism aside, beauty is an advantage (or not, ask Menelaus. Don’t know him? Look him up). →

Working from home

19th March 2021 A year ago, our President advised his fallow South Heficans that we would all have to stay at home for a bit. There are a lot of songs with the word ‘home’ in them. There’s Simon and Garfunkel’s Homeward Bound (Homeward bound I wish I was Homeward bound, Home where my thought’s escapin’, Home... →

I’m sorry, I’ll read that again

12th March 2021 The telephone system in this country is currently worse than it was during the time of farm telephone lines. You don’t know what a farm telephone line is? (Or don’t know what a telephone or, indeed, what a farm is?) It was like this: a group of farms in a district were fitted with telephone... →

A weapon to end all wars

5th March 2021 Those of you who love karma or schadenfreude (as I do) probably have watched YouTube videos of Somali pirates being shot up by various warships. Schadenfreude is German and it’s made up of the words 'schaden', which means ‘harm’ or ‘damage’, and 'freude', which means ‘joy’. By definition, finding... →

All in 38 years

26th February 2021 In 1982, I was working for GEC Engineering Services, in Germiston. I reported to Pierre Ballot, who was an incredibly good engineer. My job was to test and commission electrical equipment that had been made by other GEC organisations. I don’t think I was very good at my job. The problem was that... →

Something to make you laugh

19th February 2021 I was on the witness stand as an expert witness. The applicant has submitted an affidavit that a power line conductor broke off and set the veld alight. He claims he has lost hectares of valuable grazing, to wit, Eragrostis Teff. His affidavit would make a sailor weep. Owing to the loss of... →

Great engineering failures

12th February 2021 I don’t believe in climate change. I recently mentioned this to a young adult American woman (23 years old). She said, “Uh, huh”, but clearly thought I was wrong. I said to her, look, it’s like this: the world always needs an enemy to fight. So we had ‘power lines cause cancer’, ‘bird flu’,... →

Being paid to whistle

5th February 2021 You may have seen Bianca Goodson (Smith) on TV or somewhere. She is the former Trillian CEO who testified how the company swindled Eskom and Transnet. As a result of her evidence at the Public Enterprises Committee’s inquiry into State capture, Eskom recovered a few millions from Trillian and... →

Power system dog maths

29th January 2021 ‘Dog Mathematics’ is mathematics you could teach a dog to do. The dog may not get it right, depending on the complexity, but it’s all real cute all the same. In 1998, I wrote to Eskom and said that, as far as I could see it, the utility would run out of power in about nine years – in 2007. Eskom... →

What makes people smart?

22nd January 2021 In May 1941, the city of London was bombed and the seat of Parliament, the House of Commons, was very badly damaged. When it was being rebuilt, Winston Churchill was asked if the original seating arrangement should be altered. He said not – the original seats had been such that government and... →

Running off a cliff

15th January 2021 Lemmings do not commit suicide. The little rodents throwing themselves off a cliff is mythical. However, this particular myth is based on actual lemming behaviours. When the concentration of lemmings becomes too high in one area, a large group migrates and may die in the migration process. The... →

Visually disturbing

11th December 2020 Members of the electrical engineering profession are guilty of disturbing the visual environment. You may not have realised this, but it is so. We erect power station chimney stacks that give off smoke, and we erect cooling towers that give off steam, which unreliable journalists tell the... →

Thirty days

4th December 2020 It was recently reported in this fine newspaper: “In an effort to ensure small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in South Africa survive the economic crisis, more than 50 large companies have formally committed to paying their SME suppliers within 30 days. The initiative, called #PayIn30, is... →

Fallow South Africans

27th November 2020 I don’t speak South African languages with any competence. Our President, apart from his pronunciation of the word ‘fellow’, has a good command of the English language and other South African languages. When he addresses us on the occasional Thursday, he raises matters of Covid-19 and... →

Sans serif

20th November 2020 Claude Shannon is virtually unknown, but his work was fundamental in the creation of the digital computer. A law which he was partly responsible for is the Shannon Hartley law of information transmission, which states that the maximum amount of information that can be transmitted is proportional... →

2020: The year of wonder

13th November 2020 In my second year at the University of the Witwatersrand, in 1972, (yes, people were alive then and could do sums an’ all) the HP 35 calculator was released onto the market by Hewlett Packard. The calculator weighed only 255 g. Named for its 35 keys, the device enabled users to make complicated... →

Twisting the knife

6th November 2020 In the wonderful musical, Les Misérables, the lead character, Jean Valjean, goes to a hotel to collect the daughter of Fantine. Fantine has been paying a couple who run an inn to look after her daughter, Cosette. When Valjean gets to the inn, the innkeepers make him pay large sums of cash for... →

Religious noise complaints

30th October 2020 There is a film, The Secret of Santa Vittoria. Santa Vittoria is an Italian town renowned for its vineyards. In the storyline, at some stage the residents realise that the nearby village could hear the sound of the bell in the Vittoria church and use it to mark the time of morning mass. The... →

Hydrogen Power

23rd October 2020 Now that it has finally dawned on some of us that cars with batteries require to be charged and that it takes time for this to happen and its not the same time as needed by the driver to have refreshment… enter the promise of the hydrogen fuel cell car. Now it happens that I own a hydrogen fuel... →

Can’t get thicker than this

16th October 2020 It was reported that, "following months of delay, Mineral Resources and Energy Minister Gwede Mantashe [had] published the Gazette opening the way for the procurement of 4 800 MW of onshore wind, 2 000 MW of solar photovoltaic (PV), 3 000 MW of gas- or diesel-to-power, 1 500 MW of new coal and... →

40 years on

9th October 2020 When I was 19, I fell in love with a girl who was studying at the University Cape Town (UCT). I was studying at the University of the Witwatersrand at the time and had just finished my second, second year of electrical engineering. But, in the July holidays, I had met this girl and decided that I... →

Electrical scams

2nd October 2020 You’ve heard of a ‘microgrid’? I Googled it and found that: “A microgrid is a miniaturised version of the larger grid, a configuration of energy resources, distribution wires and buildings, all within a distinct geographic footprint. There is no size limit, but microgrids tend to be scaled to... →

Wood, trees and very dense forests

25th September 2020 Naked and Afraid is a TV programme which documents American couples who are dropped off at some remote location, clothes removed, and try to survive warm and cold, prepare and eat food, stay hydrated, suffer insects and predators, all for 21 days. Each participant is allowed to take with them... →

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