Hi Lamare!
I have been watching this thread for ages, but have not had the space to try these mods. However, I have just downloaded the latest set and will install them now. My current hood has only just got electricity, so it will probably be dodgy for a while. Perfect for trying out this system.

EDIT: all good so far! My sims are in a rural hood which just got electricity, so I have most of them set to 'Terrible' for area and 'Normal' for the building. Plenty of blackouts etc. I love the popups telling you when the phone goes out. Someone had to fix melted fuses.

Doubleposting with a new thing...the functional microscopes (by XPTL and Nanashi, both updating a model by Katy76) don't work without electricity, although I think they ought to. The original is old CC, made in about 2006. I suspect it may have been cloned from a computer; hence the electricity..

Can I follow the steps you gave for exempting non-electric lamps? Or will it be different for a microscope/possible computer?

Recently, I was inspired to play the Sims 2 again. Playing with the electric box, I noticed two problems: 1) the events are too often even on normal settings; 2) the bug with computer's interactions being disabled even when the power is on.
The first issue is fixable. The bug, I haven't been able to figure out, yet. If you get it or similar bug with another type of object, use the debug interaction by shift-clicking on electric box to force the "power on" procedure on all objects once more. I that doesn't work, buy a new object.

I don't know if I'll publish this project in the end, even though it's my favorite. But it seems pretty stable so far, and the bugs are not terrible.

This thread has gotten messy, and thought I'd share this links list with whoever tries to find anything in here.

Most up to date files and descriptions for the electric system
Files:
- post #40 - bill penalties and solar/wind rebate
- post #93 - electric box, power generators (gas & bike), fuel can, digging accident, candle, collection file
Descriptions:
- post #39 - digging accident
- post #40 - bill penalties, solar/wind rebate
- post #43 - electric box, gas power generator and fuel can
- post #93 - bike power generator + updates on other mods
- candle's description is all over the place

(I'm not ignoring new posts, I'm just taking it slow, because the complexity of this project overwhelms me after all this time. Thank you everyone who helped me in this thread and beyond, you've been great!)

_____
Edit:
As soon as I whined about not being able to fix the bug, welp... I went ahead and fixed it! It only took tree years and the magic of whining!
I also made power and phone outages a little less often. It's a 1 out 1000 chance already.

Been doing a little testing with this in anticipation of using it during my apocalypse challenge and it seems to work as intended so far! Set to all terrible conditions with no upgrades, I get power outages or flickers about every other Sim day, which seems about right. I haven't played much more than a Sim week, though. During the flickering, my sim was cooking and she would stop whenever the power went out and laugh lol! I had to tell her to keep going whenever she did, but she managed to finish cooking it in the moments the power was on.

Anyway, I'll probably use this mostly to turn off the power entirely in my challenge, but I wanted to at least post a little feedback and a thank you for making this!

Thank you, annachibi, I'm glad you're enjoying the mod!

I guess, she's one of those people who doesn't take her misfortunes too seriously

Hey Lamare, I'm still using your electric box, and I have added a whole lot of CC lights to it. Now you have a (very welcome) update, but I don't really want to do the whole list again.
Can I do the fixes so mine matches your update? Or send you my file? I was considering publishing my version for anyone who might want the extended non-electric lights list, but it would be sensible to have the most current base object.

Hey, aelflaed. I would really prefer if the object stays in this thread and doesn't start a life of its own some place else. This is to avoid confusion between different versions down the line. You could either attach the file to your post here, or send me the file and I'll add it. That is if you've done it already. If not, I can show you how to update it quicker or update it for you. You don't have to do the whole list from scratch - just extract the BCON from the old file and import it into the new one. I haven't changed anything in that area, and the old BCON will be still good.

Okay, won't share my file then.

If I can just extract the BCON and add it into your updated object, I should be able to handle that. I'll have a go.