If an Eel Can Make Its Own Electricity, Your Business Should Too

BBC CrowdScience has been asking a question that has been bothering people for about two thousand years: how do electric fish make electricity — and why don’t they fry themselves in the process?

Listener Mouhammed in Cameroon was stunned (almost literally) that some fish can deliver a shock several times stronger than the supply in a wall socket. Presenter Caroline Steel went off to meet the eels. The short version is this: they have a built-in generating set. Stacks of special cells, called electrocytes, fire together like batteries in series. Weakly electric fish use it to navigate and chat. The serious ones use it to stop a crocodile in its tracks.

We were rather taken with that.

Image taken from BBC Sounds

At GES Power we spend our weeks looking at generating sets that are supposed to do a similar job, only with a Perkins or a CAT on the front and an ATS on the wall. Nature, it turns out, specified the system properly. Dedicated organ. Coordinated control. It works first time, every time, underwater, with no service contract.

A lot of the kits we see on site are less impressive. Rusting canopies. Batteries not even bolted down. A non-genuine controller bolted on because the original one gave up. Contactors buzzing on a rural supply, waiting for the next brown-out to drop the coils and take the building with them. The eel would not stand for it.

There is one lesson from the programme we will happily steal. Electric fish do not just make power. They control it. They do not dump the lot into themselves. Your changeover panel should be the same. A motorised switch ATS lets you decide when to go to generator — total loss, phase loss, or by hand — instead of hoping a coil stays pulled in.

We cannot fit you an electric organ. We can fit a generator that starts, a panel that transfers, and cabling that is actually big enough for the supply. That is close enough.

If your standby power is more “tired goldfish” than electric eel, give us a call.

01246 380525hello@generator-man.co.ukwww.generator-man.co.uk

GES Power Ltd – Backup power. No fins required.