Way back in the day – early 1920’s, when the empire builders in SE Asia retired, some wanted to settle at KeriKeri. Apparently this wasn’t so easy because their wives had been used to several servants. They said if they weren’t going to have servants in NZ (and nobody wanted to be their servants) then they needed electricity to do the work instead. If they didn’t get that, then they weren’t going to move. Hmph.

So the blokes got together and had a power station built. They tapped into the KeriKeri river, diverted part of the flow through some iron pipes to a power house (about the size of your average garage), and installed an overhead Pelton wheel attached to a generator. And ran cables to the houses of the wives in question.

All 17 of them.

This is what it looked like in its heyday:

And this is what it looks like now:
Apparently it worked good and everyone was happy.

As it was:

Now: