Nights on a white charger

I was in town this morning, on Bulevar, drinking coffee and reading a really interesting book about doors. A car stopped, the driver jumped out and went into the paper shop to get a newspaper. While he was parked, in the middle of the one way street, a van came up behind and had to wait. When the paper purchaser came out of the shop the van driver shouted to him "You couldn't do that in Madrid".  And it's true

Nobody would describe Pinoso, or even Culebrón, as "Deep Spain", la España profunda. That's the Spain that's empty, without services, left behind by the modern world. No mobile network, no health services locally, no Internet access, no shops. But lots of Spain is like that; nearly empty. There are hundreds of villages that only have a few inhabitants, usually older people, and there are even villages that are totally abandoned apart from, maybe, occasional weekend and summer occupants. There's a whole movement about la España vaciada, empty or emptied Spain. Pinoso is very rural, very traditional, but it has plenty of shops and businesses and even a bit of social life. Young people say it's a bit boring but I remember that Peterborough was voted the crappiest town in the UK by young people a few years ago so we can't take much notice of them can we? And, if Pinoso is rural then Culebrón is much more so.

We once looked at a house in Huntingdon with a view to buying. It was one of those big pre war villas with a really nice, mature, fenced in garden. Inside it was original. The wiring for the lights was bell wire tacked onto the wall. There were 5 amp and a few 15 amp round pin plugs. Original wiring. The house was above our budget anyway and we knew that a full rewire, and the rest, would just be so expensive. Every time we passed that house, modernised by its new owners, I wished we'd been rich enough to buy it.

I never really thought about the electric installation in the UK as I moved from house to house. I still have no idea what sort of circuit breakers/fuses most places have but I know that they never popped unless something went seriously wrong. Here in Spain it's something to be aware of as you buy or rent a house or flat. You might have a contract for 5.5kw for instance. In theory this means that the fuses might pop with just a tumble dryer, the oven and an aircon unit on. In practice the circuit breakers are quite elastic and you could probably draw about 11kw before they plunge you into darkness. Here in Culebrón, for years, we got by with 2.2kw because the infrastructure wasn't up to supplying much more and even now we only have 3.45kw. It doesn't really cause us much of a problem except on cold winter mornings when it's easy to get over enthusiastic with fan heaters, toasters, kettles and microwaves.

At the start of next month all the electric bills in Spain will be changed to reflect a new three tier pricing system based on the time of day. In the parlance there will be peaks, troughs and plains. Rather unsurprisingly the most expensive electricity is when demand is highest and the least expensive is in the dead of night and also on national holidays and at weekends. For those of us on a controlled price type contract this will be reflected directly in the bill. We'll be able to see how much we were charged in each time zone. The idea is that we will change our habits to save money and consequently be a bit greener. How the companies that sell power in the free market pass on the new pricing structure will, presumably, be reflected in each customer's contract.

The interesting thing about this new three time zone controlled contract is that it also allows for two different levels of supply. For instance if you have a power supply of 10kw you may decide that in the troughs you could get by with 5kw. In our case the contracted power is so pathetic that we'd be popping fuses left right and centre, particularly over the weekends and on those bank holidays, but if we lived in a less rural place with a decent supply, it might be worth considering dropping the contracted power supply overnight. As you may expect the price for a lower rated supply is less than for a higher rated supply. The example that is always quoted is for the people with electric cars. Charge up overnight on doubly cheaply rated electric.

I rather suspect in our case that the new three tier system will make our electric bills just a tad more expensive than the current two tier system we're on. It might also mean that I have to stay up a bit later to run the washing machine from midnight and the tumble dryer at the end of the wash cycle or maybe I can get Alexa to do it for me.