Mandeno’s plan was to harness the power of Kerikeri’s Rainbow Falls, and in 1929 the Alderton Utility Company constructed a dam and diversion weir. Water flowed via the weir into a water race that turned the turbine in the powerhouse located 1.3km upstream from the famous Stone Store.

On 11 June 1930, the power was officially turned on in Kerikeri, servicing the needs of 17 consumers with a reticulated network that covered about eight kilometres. The network grew as Kerikeri grew and remained in service until 1966, when it was deemed no longer viable, and decommissioned by the Bay of Islands Electric Power Board.

The early years of Kerikeri’s electrical service were as colourful as the immigrants who had newly arrived from foreign parts, and who appear to have been a source of constant intrigue to some of the established farming families who had lived there for years.

“When we arrived here to live in 1931 .... to my father’s astonishment lights were left on in the Homestead Hotel all night,” recalled Richard Benner.

“When he asked why the waste, they replied ‘that there was no waste as the electricity was being made all the time with the generator on non-stop in its action and it really didn’t matter whether you wasted the electricity or not’. This went against his normal Scottish frugal outlook.”

Benner had a ringside seat to the earliest years of the town’s experiment with raw power. In later years he remembered the experience of turning the kettle on only to see the house lights fade.

“Sometimes on wet winter nights the power would get very weak, and the lights would dim and perhaps go right out, but this was the signal [for] our maintenance man, Perrin Williams, to go and find out why,” he remembered.

“He would have to go along the water race until eventually he found the culprit – a dead, or nearly dead, cow or sheep that had fallen in and blocked the flow. At the far end by the waterfall there was a metal gate with bars on it to let the water through and strain out the unnecessary cows and sheep.”

Perrin Williams was something of a dynamo. He needed to be. As the Alderton Utility Company’s sole employee – and one of the only electricians living locally – he did virtually all the wiring in the homes, supervised the erection of all the lines and was also responsible for maintaining the generator down at the power station.

Perrin’s job description, which was as expansive as the landscape he was servicing, was not helped by the way the Alderton Utility Company – sometimes referred to as the Alderton Futility Company by unhappy subscribers – had set things up.

Rather than run power lines along the roadside, in order to save money, the company ran the lines across country which meant that powerlines ran across shelter belts – which meant that the trees had to be regularly trimmed; a full-time job in itself.

But if the infrastructure was problematic, the pricing structure devised by the company was probably unique in the world, as Richard Benner recalled.

“In order to save the expense of installing meters and having to pay meter readers, they decided to merely charge so much per unit of electricity by saying, if you have one radiator that would cost you so much, if you have one stove, that will cost you another figure, if you have five lights or so many rooms in your house that will be so much per room.”

That was fine initially, but as Kerikeri grew, electricity became ever in short supply. The habits of some electricity consumers also made things worse.