Backup Split

Wherever a handful of houses or a couple of shops share one generator to get through a power cut, the argument is always the same afterwards: whose circuit was actually on, for how long, and who owes what share of the diesel. It usually gets settled by memory, by whoever shouts loudest, or by splitting it evenly between however many households happen to be on the arrangement - which is rarely what anyone actually agrees is fair, because nobody was switched on for the same length of time as anybody else, and nobody wrote any of it down. Backup Split keeps one thing: whose circuit was switched on, on which run of the generator, and for how long. Every run is drawn as its own strip of time, and every household on it gets its own lane inside that strip, filled in exactly where it joined and where it left - a household on for the whole run fills its lane edge to edge, one that joined an hour…