Night glow

Sometime, at the beginning of last month, I fired up one of the butane gas heaters in the living room for the first time this season and, a couple of days ago, the pellet burner roared into life after a rest of  at least six months.

We're closing in on the time of year I really dislike in Spain. The time of year when you can't be sure that the washing on the line will dry, when it's colder inside than out. The time of the year when the water in the shower takes ages to run hot, when the bathroom mirror drips with condensation, when it's best to choose today's outfit the night before when the room is still heated. It's the time of year when I can't hear the telly for the roar of the pellet burner.

Since we turned the clocks back we've had a couple of nasty, cold, wet, windy days but winter hasn't really arrived in inland Alicante yet. The mounds of leaves in the garden still say autumnal but winter is very nearly here.

Over the years we've owned six of the butane gas heaters. We were down to three and one of them wasn't working as it should - the fibreglass type matting was shredded and the gas was burning incompletely and unevenly. I whizzed it in the bin and did a bit of research. Whether we should buy blue flame as against catalytic or radiant heaters; which manufacturers were to be trusted and which not. I settled on a radiant type with 4.2kw output from a firm in Murcia and I was pleased when it was available at two different prices in two local shops. I could support local businesses and still feel like a wise shopper without going online.

I set up the heater pretty quickly. I know about hot water to soften the rubber pipes to make connecting the pipes easier, I know about the "sell by date" on the tubing, I know about the different pressures on the regulators and I had all I needed in the garage. But the stupid thing wouldn't fire up. Next day back in the shop the man didn't really believe me but I'd taken a gas cylinder with me. He couldn't make it work either. They got me another for the next day. The new one works.

It was Maggie who turned on the pellet burner. It fired up OK and I went out to work. I expected a toasty living room when I got home. No though. Cool, cold, miserable in the living room with Maggie in a thick cardigan. The pellet burner had given up the ghost. I sorted it out the next day.

The pellets in the heater were the last we had, leftovers from last season. I was sent to buy more. We've had trouble with the quality of pellets over the years and we now get them from a shop about fifteen kilometres from Culebrón. When I got there the shop was obviously open but the door was locked. I've seen this before. It's not an ironmongers that is overwhelmed with customers and the owner is quick to pop out to their warehouse. I waited, and waited. Two other people waited with me for a while. Half an hour. I got the pellets though and yesterday the living room was bathed in that reassuring orangey light.

The lustrum

If I'm grouping people together, pigeon-holing them, stereotyping them, then short sleeved Ben Sherman shirt wearing engineers and model train enthusiasts is a group. I find I often get on well with them. I seem to like people who are enthusiastic about things.

Spanish law says that if you have gas equipment it has to be safety checked. It may well be different for fixed, mains type gas, but for the installations that run on the 12/13 kilo butane bottles the periodicity of that check is five years. The last time we got a check the man who came along was one of those neat and tidy engineers. He was wearing his CEPSA uniform but, if he hadn't been, he'd have had a pocket protector. He seemed to do his job efficiently and we talked about nothing in particular whilst he checked this and that. As we were signing off the paperwork he made his, presumably standard, sales pitch and said that his firm also did routine maintenance of gas appliances. I remembered that and, last year, when we couldn't get the water to run hot I gave him a ring.

He came to service the boiler and the truth is that he couldn't get it to work properly. We complained and he came back, a couple of times, and tried hard to sort it out. He was always well mannered, he didn't seem at all perturbed that we'd called him back but in the end we took his advice that the water heater was jiggered and we even went to the supplier he recommended for a new one.

Google calendar told me that the lustrum, the five years was up. Time to get all the gas stuff safety checked. The appointment was for 5 pm today and at 4.59 pm my mobile phone went. Obviously enough the bloke knew where we lived so, unlike most people, I hadn't needed to dash across to the village to lead him to the house. He'd tried the door and I hadn't answered. Nonetheless, a minute early? Come on. It took nearly an hour, he changed bits of rubber tubing so that it wouldn't be out of date till his next visit, he checked exhaust gas levels, he drew little diagrams on the safety report, I handed over the 60€ and we agreed to meet again in 2022. I must ask him his name next time.

Energy poverty

There are a lot of people in Spain who have difficulty in paying their energy bills. A nice warm house, when it's cold outside, is one of those symbols of well being and comfort. Just think of any of the filmed versions of A Christmas Carol. Being cold is miserable

I've lived in six different flats in my time in Spain. None of them have had gas, just electricity. Whilst there are plenty of people who have piped gas and many more who use bottled gas when Spaniards talk about energy they are really talking about electric.

That's not our case; in Culebrón we have a gas hob, gas water heater and we generally use gas fires to heat the house. We have a pellet burner too, a device that burns reconstituted wood pellets, but it has been giving us a bit of trouble recently and we have fallen back on the gas fires over Christmas. Because we have been in the house for longer periods and, because we are rich enough and determined enough not to be cold we have bought five gas bottles since the 21st at a cost of close on 70€. Our last electric bill was also the highest that it's ever been. It's not even been a cold autumn or winter so far. The problem for us is that any heat we pour into the house flies out of the poorly insulated building. Our house is old, it was not built with energy saving in mind and, if there was any thought at all about the design of the house it was to keep it cool not warm. After all we live in one of the warmest parts of Spain. As I've said many times on this blog we are much colder here than we ever were in the UK during the late Autumns and Winters.

I've heard it said lots of times that electricity in Spain is amongst the most expensive in Europe. We get a subsidy on our electric supply, the social bonus, because our supply contract is for 2.2kw. This isn't from choice, the infrastructure of the supply company isn't tough enough to give us more power. This social bonus is applied to anyone who has a supply of less than 3kw, the idea being that it is poorer people who have low power supplies. Although my hourly pay rate is around the UK minimum wage we are not exactly poor and the fact that we get the bonus shows that it doesn't, necessarily, offer financial support to the people who most need it.

Doing the crude maths of dividing our last bill by the number of kWh we pay just over 14 cents per kilowatt. Without the social subsidy that would go up to 17 cents which is around 14 pence. Our standing charges are about 27% of the total though in some of the flats we've lived in, particularly the one which had a decent supply of 10 kWh, that rose to nearly 50% of the total. This high percentage of standing charge means that, however hard you try to save power, you only have control over a percentage of the cost. One of the ways people try to reduce their bills is by lowering their supply with the result that circuit breakers trip all the time when you try to pull more power than you are paying for.

This energy poverty isn't just about income. It's a balance between the money coming in and the power that a household needs to consume. In Spain the figures suggest that some 17% of households, or seven and a half million people, have difficulty in maintaining their homes above 18ºC. In countries in the North of Europe the figure is usually quoted at around 2-3%. In Spain too there is more of a problem in the warmer parts of the country because of the build quality. The homes in Asturias are built to keep warm whilst houses in Andalucia are not. Fit, younger adults can get away with colder houses than those that have older people or children.

Apparently this is a Europe wide concern, with the UK being one of the pioneers with laws and regulations designed to help people in a bad way. Here in Spain the politicians have only just really got around to talking about it. A recent case where an 81 year old died in a fire caused by a candle after her power was cut off has given a certain urgency to the matter. Only the other day, a deal was struck between three of the four principal political parties for new regulations.

I have a horrible feeling though that like many Spanish laws, for instance the Freedom of Information law, the new regulations will be more window dressing than substance.

All mod cons

My Auntie Lizzie used to take me to Blackpool when I was a lad. We stayed in B&Bs that advertised hot and cold running water. It was a long time before en suite bathrooms.

In Auntie Lizzie's day people used to say that houses had mod cons - modern conveniences. Our house, the one we live in now, has all those mod cons but they seem to be in open revolt. I told you about the water a while ago.

To sort our water supply we rang the Town Hall. Their people came in a Jeep, wielded a spanner or two, and told me it was all sorted. It wasn't though. Inside the house water flow was still a problem. I called a plumber. He changed a couple of valves and assured me that it was all hunky dory. It wasn't though. I rang our gas contract supplier and asked them to service the boiler. They did, they said it was as right as rain. It wasn't though. They are going to have another stab tomorrow.

A bulb blew. When I took the cover off the lamp I was surprised to find an incandescent bulb. That bulb must have been as old as the room. I thought we had low energy stuff everywhere but, when I checked, I found lots of old style bulbs. I spent a fortune on new ones with really impressive looking energy ratings. I set aside ten minutes, between other jobs, to change the lamps. Changing the light bulbs was a bit like those old shaggy dog jokes - it just went on and on for ever. I even had to replace a couple of fittings.

We have fluorescent tubes in the kitchen. There has always been a delay between flicking the switch, the starters popping and the tubes glowing but the wait had become interminable. It wasn't the first time we'd had the problem. I thought new tubes and starters would get us back to a reasonable response time. In the ironmongers, as I inspected the tubes, Olegario, the owner, interested himself in my purchase. He told me that the tube I had in my hand was LED. Being relatively good at reading I'd worked that out. I picked out a couple of tubes and told him I needed starters too. Olegario knew otherwise and explained that I needed to dump the ballast and starters for the LED tubes to work. Back in our kitchen, with instructions followed, the tubes wouldn't fire up. YouTube told me what Olegario hadn't. The replacement didn't go smoothly but, in the sanitised words of Gordon Hamnet, there was only one winner here and it wasn't the light fitting.

So, changing a few bulbs had taken me several hours.

Over the years we have used various devices to heat our house. Gas stoves - calor gas type heaters - have been our mainstay. After years of faithful service the original batch of three started to do things they shouldn't do. We feared for our lives in an explosion of metal shards from ruptured gas bottles. New gas stoves were purchased. In the meantime Maggie had invested real money in a pellet burner. With the pellet burner as the main heat source and the two newer gas heaters, and the rest, in reserve I thought we had everything covered. Except that the gas heaters have started to mysteriously turn themselves off. Obviously it's some form of safety cut out but our carbon monoxide meter has nothing to say on the matter. Valves and tubes have been changed. Why the heaters turn themselves off is something known only to the Taiwanese or Turks that built the things. Last night, as I got home, the living room radiated coolness. "I can't get either the gas stove or the pellet burner to light," said Maggie. The gas stove was no problem. Maggie just doesn't have the knack but the pellet burner took an hour to sort. Nothing seriously wrong but a pain in the proverbial.

Auntie Lizzie's house only had cold water in the scullery. Her outside toilet was a basically a big pit. The heating was by coal fires. I think she had electric but gas lighting hadn't completely disappeared in my youth so I may be wrong. I'm ever so pleased that things have moved on and we have modern conveniences nowadays.

Luxury

I painted the front door last week. I did an awful job; all runs and dead flies. Maggie and I agreed that it looked better than before though. Anyway it was bucolic, rustic, in keeping with our living situation.

Our electric supply is a bit rural too. When we moved in, we were smart enough to put our cooking and weater heating onto gas. True, we have to lug the gas bottles about but we don't have circuit breakers popping all the time.

The hot water isn't as hot in winter as in summer. Insulation is not common in our part of the world so we were not at all surprised that the water was cooler in the colder months. It had to pass through all that cold earth. We weren't surprised either that the water got hotter more quickly in one bathroom than the others - more cold ground = cooler water for longer.

We've had some lovely weather recently. High 20s and sunny so and I was a bit surprised that the hot water was more like tepid water. Shower time was not a pleasure. Grease stuck obstinately to the cutlery as we washed up. It took us days to decide that it wasn't just rural it was a problem. I tried some home solutions but, eventually, we called Jesús, the plumber. At first he was stumped too. We had water, we had gas, the boiler was lighting up, why was the water not hot enough? He found the fault though, an intermittent fault. He's fixed it now and the water is scalding hot.

It's amazing how luxurious it feels to have hot water.

I am the egg man

We once asked Eduardo if he would sell us a beer. He has a restaurant in the village. He was there, the door was open and the sun was shining but he said no explaining that he didn't run a bar but a restaurant.

That seems to have changed and Eduardo's now has cars parked outside, and presumably customers inside, most mornings. On Wednesday mornings, or at least for the past three Wednesday mornings, we've joined the throng and gone in. We've eaten a late breakfast with some Spanish people from the village and some local, though not Culebronero, Britons. I like going there. I like supporting a local business and I like doing something community.

When we were there today we bought some eggs. One of the expats keeps hens and she has found a ready market for their eggs in our neighbours and in us. A couple of weeks ago Maria was saying that she had been waiting for the man who brings the gas bottles - he hadn't shown up before breakfast time so she'd left the bottles out. He'll just charge me when he catches me in she said - he'll do the same for you she said. The cheese man came today - apparently one of the types he sells is good for deep frying to serve with jam. Next it was the bread man who comes Wednesdays and Fridays  - he'll hang the bread on your gate if you're not in - next to the recharged gas bottles presumably.

This is not earth shattering, It's not even particularly interesting. When I was a boy there were mobile shops everywhere. Moving to this century my sister has ordered all her staple food online from Tesco for years and, as far as I know, if we were about half a kilometre down the road Mercadona would do the same for us here.

The interesting thing is that we have lived here for years and we didn't know. Why didn't we know?

Services

When I put the clocks back later tonight I'm going to retune the telly. The way the frequencies are divided up between mobile phone services and TV networks is being changed so it's either a laborious retune (splendid design Samsung people!) or lose channels. TV is one of the few things we generally get as well here as anywhere in Spain.

My phone provider sent me one of those super offers the other day. For just two euros more per month I could have 40 new TV channels, increase the ADSL speed to a maximum of 100 Mb and get double the number of download gigs on my mobile phone. I tried to sign up. None of the advantages were available here in Culebrón - no 4G, no fibre, not even the TV channels. That's what you get for living in the countryside. ADSL at 3 Mb maximum and a dodgy mobile signal.

When I worked at the furniture shop my boss had a go at house selling. I used to take the pictures and write the blurb for the sales sheets. Lots of people who lived up some unmade track would tell me that they'd spent so many thousands on bringing in mains water or having the placed hooked up to the power grid. When you live in the middle of nowhere you suddenly realise that these things are good. The trouble is that for buyers, these services are as basic as walls and a roof and add no value whatsoever to the sales price of a house.

We have running water. Not the hardly purified agricultural water that some country houses get by on but proper clean water. They are running a gas pipeline pretty close to our house. It will take piped gas from Monóvar to Pinoso and on to Algüeña. There will be no little spur to our village so we will have to continue lugging gas bottles around. We suspect that one of the diggers or lorries damaged our water pipes. We had a couple of days of intermittent water and pressure so low that the gas water heater wouldn't fire up. Cold dribbly showers are horrid even in the relative warmth of this October.

They put drains in the village a few years ago. The nearest access point was about 300 metres from our house. They told us we could connect up to it if we wished but we'd have to dig our own trench and put in our own pipework. We decided to stick with our septic tank even though it sometimes smells a bit. That didn't stop them charging us 45€ per year for drainage costs though.

The electric supply is a bit ancient too. We get a lot of power cuts, generally only a couple of minutes but not always. We only have 2.2 Kw of supply. The Spanish word for electric isn't electric - it's light. That's because that's what power was for most houses at first. A dim 25w bulb to rival the candles and oil lamps of earlier generations. Our Twenty First Century 2.5 Kw electric kettle would blow the circuit breakers on our 1970s power supply every time we fancied a cuppa if it were not for a bit of skullduggery on our part. Long before the palm tree was menacing the supply we talked with our neighbour about bringing in more power. The price was around 18,000€ so we all quietly forgot about it.

Life in the country is lovely - great views. But sometimes as the internet grinds slowly, the water dribbles, the lights dim and the gas heater sputters to a halt waiting for a new bottle I forget all about those views and long for a nearby bar and tarmac underfoot.