Welcome to AC. I guess you define the boomer generation or is there such in South Africa? I am not sure how involved South Africa was in the war. Very nice system you got there. How stable is your power grid and do find AC filtering/surge suppression necessary?
Back in the days of WWII, South Africa was still part of the British Empire and, as a loyal colony (mostly), our lads went off to fight - initially and mainly in the Western Desert and after Alamein, in Italy. Some went to Burma too.
As to the power grid, that's another saga all on its own right now....
Basically we get fluctuations that see the mains voltage shift from its nominal level of 230vAC to as low as 190v and as high as 255v - although not as bad in the area in which I live (typically 220v to 250v). Over and above the voltage movement, there's also a fair amount of "noise". And that was the case up until about a month ago...
Now, our state-run electricity supply entity (ESKOM) has run into capacity problems arising from two main factors:
a) Since 1994, no additional capacity has been added to the grid, despite an annual demand growth rate of ~10%
b) In December 2007, poor maintenance started to bite and we've seen "unplanned shutdowns" as a result
This has given rise to a situation where ESKOM have had to institute programmed outages by area in a process they define as "load shedding".
The impact is usually a single two-hour cut per day, but occasionally under heavy demand (very hot summer days), we seen two of these two-hour cuts per day. The outlook for our coming Winter is a bit bleak as the demand here in Winter is a fair bit higher than in Summer.
So, at one level, the noisy lines tend to demand some form of line conditioner (hence the Quintet), while the voltage swings would really only be addressed by some form of regenerator.
This is, however, somewhat academic when the power is off due to ESKOM load-shedding... (light the gas lamps, grab a book and chill...)
Isn't Nature wonderful?
