jigawatt Unit 001 · Brooding
Unit 001 / Lower Himalayas / Monsoon, 2026

jigawatt.

The first one, on purpose.

A small machine that disagrees with lightning.

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The act

Lightning gets close. The box notices.

Somewhere on a damp concrete wall in the lower Himalayas, a small black box runs through a single calculation thousands of times a second.

When a discharge happens within ten kilometres, it drops a relay, and the house — briefly — becomes its own island. By the time the thunder catches up, the decision is already made.

It is the only thing the box is built to do. It does it quietly, alone, in a forgotten utility cupboard, against a sky that does not care.

Surge protectors are insurance. This is a closed door.

— the premise
How it works

Four moves, in order.

  1. 01

    Strike

    A discharge somewhere inside ten kilometres. The sensor sees it before the thunder does.

  2. 02

    Decide

    Classified, distance estimated, threshold cleared. The controller agrees with itself.

  3. 03

    Open

    Coil drops. The contactor falls under its own spring. The house becomes an island.

  4. 04

    Wait

    Five-minute cool-off, reset by any new strike. Then the door closes. The house re-joins.

The jigawatt unit: a matte black box with two amber indicator LEDs and a thin copper antenna.
The unit

One was made. It lives in a wall.

Hand-built in May 2026, just ahead of the summer monsoon. Single deployment. A matte-black enclosure roughly the size of a paperback, with two amber LEDs that read, depending on the light, as indicators or as eyes.

It is not lightning protection. It is a fast, dumb switch with an opinion about timing. It sits on a wall, draws very little power, and waits.

The numbers

Four figures, with their units.

Detection radius
10km
Trips on any discharge inside this perimeter.
Trip latency
40ms
Detect to disconnect. Roughly one blink.
Switching
40A · 4P
Both lives and neutral. Fail-open by design.
Mains
230V
Indian domestic supply. UPS rides the gap.
A small honesty

There is one of these in the world. There may eventually be two. There is no roadmap, no SKU, no insurer who recognises it, no agency that has tested it.

The contactor will, when asked, sever 9.2 kilowatts of household load in roughly the time it takes to blink. That is the entire promise.

Provenance

Where the name comes from.

A homage to Back to the Future's "1.21 gigawatts," reliably mispronounced "jigawatts" by Doc Brown and now reliably re-explained to bewildered listeners.

Spelled here without the g, said the same way, never corrected.

Family

Part of starstucklab.

A small ecosystem of personal engineering instruments, each built to solve one specific problem and then, ideally, stop demanding attention.

Where science met poetry, had a brief fling with engineering, and now raises mildly disillusioned but talented offspring.