Load-Shedding Survival Guide for Modern Dhaka Apartments
Modern Dhaka apartments were designed on the quiet assumption that mains power is continuous. When it is not — and in April to August it very often is not — every convenience the building sells you (elevators, water pumps, intercoms, gated-community WiFi) becomes a coping exercise. This is what actually works.
Step one: know the cadence of your grid
Every neighbourhood has a rhythm. In Mirpur-11 the outages tend to cluster between 1 and 4 p.m. In parts of Bashundhara-A it is early evening. Dhanmondi has been more evenly spread through the day for the last two years. Track the first two weeks of April yourself with a note on your phone — DPDC and DESCO alerts help, but the ground truth is your own logbook. Once you know your window, you can shift laundry, cooking and Zoom calls around it instead of being surprised.
What an IPS actually powers
The most common mistake is expecting an IPS to run everything. It cannot. Rough load reality in an apartment:
- 1 kVA IPS (800W usable): 4 tube lights + 2 fans + WiFi router + a laptop or two + phone chargers. That is it. No fridge, no AC, no water pump.
- 2 kVA IPS (1600W usable): everything above plus a small fridge and a TV, if the fridge is efficient and the TV is under 50”.
- 3 kVA IPS + 200Ah battery bank: the above plus one 1.5-ton AC for around 90 minutes on a full charge, or a 2-ton for around 45 minutes. This is a ৳110,000+ installation before wiring.
No sub-3 kVA IPS runs an AC. Trying will trip it within seconds. If a shop tells you otherwise they are selling you a battery you will not be happy with.
Fan-first, AC-later cooling
Because AC is the most brittle load, most of the practical work is in reducing how much you rely on AC, especially during peak-outage hours.
- The right ceiling fan does more than half the work. A modern BLDC fan at 350 rpm on inverter-friendly settings gives the same perceived cooling as an older 3-blade unit at 380 rpm, on a quarter of the wattage. If your fans are older than ten years, replacing three of them beats buying a bigger IPS.
- Cross-ventilation, if the flat allows it. A window open on a shaded side plus a window open on a west-facing side creates a draw. If your only openings are on one side, this does not work — that is when window treatments become the tool.
- Block west-facing sun before it hits the room, not after. Once heat is in the walls, the AC has to remove it. Reflective outdoor mats over west-facing windows, external shutters if your building allows, or serious daytime window covering that reflects heat rather than absorbs it. Fabric curtains that hang against the glass and heat up are almost useless for this — dedicated sunscreen or blackout blinds mounted 4–6” away from the glass, with airflow between the glass and the blind, are what actually work.
We covered west-facing heat in its own guide — worth reading if your master bedroom faces west, which for most Mirpur and Uttara apartments it does.
The small things
- A rechargeable pedestal fan with a 20,000 mAh battery is under ৳6,500 in 2026 and gets you three to four hours of a single room being liveable if the IPS dies mid-outage.
- A dedicated router UPS. ৳2,800, keeps WiFi and the ONT alive for four hours. Being on video calls during power cuts becomes a solved problem.
- Head torches, not phone torches. Sounds trivial. Try cooking dal by phone torch once and you will buy two head torches the next morning.
- A cheap DC ceiling fan for one room wired directly to a solar-charge battery. Not for the whole flat — for one room you can retreat to when the IPS is out and the mains are out. The setup runs about ৳18,000 in 2026 and pays back the first week of a bad outage stretch.
- Manual water pump backup. If your building’s roof tank pump is on mains and there is no generator, you have one to two flushes of stored bathroom water and no drinking water once the outage passes six hours. Keep 20 litres of drinking water and 40 litres of utility water stored somewhere shaded.
What we would not spend money on
- A whole-flat generator. Diesel prices, fuel storage rules, and neighbour complaints make this a bad answer for anyone not on a ground-floor unit with private outdoor space.
- A “solar backup” pitched at less than ৳80,000. Genuine off-grid solar for a 2-bed apartment is a real installation. Sub-৳80k pitches are usually a single 100W panel and a lead-acid battery that will disappoint within a season.
- “Portable” air conditioners. They exist. They do not work well in Dhaka humidity, and they need a window vent that in a modern apartment is often the west-facing window you were trying to cover.
Priority order if you can only buy three things this season
- A properly sized IPS with a technician’s load audit (৳45,000–110,000 depending on tier)
- Two BLDC ceiling fans for the most-used rooms (৳16,000 total)
- A router UPS and two rechargeable pedestal fans (৳15,000 total)
That is under ৳150,000 for a setup that turns four-hour outages from a crisis into an inconvenience. Everything beyond that is comfort optimisation, not survival.