Megawatt hours and their smaller offspring

As I shaved I was listening to the radio, to the part they call a tertulia, that's the bit where pundits, usually journalists, talk about the latest news. They were talking about inflation and about electric prices. They had some boffin who knew all about the electric market. One little tidbit he dropped in at the end of his section was that every Spanish electric bill has a QR code which leads to a webpage maintained by some sort of Government quango, the "National Energy Commission". By using that code/website, you get a direct comparison between your last bill and the market in general. 

To explain it all properly would take pages and pages. It's quite complicated stuff, so I've kept this as short as my ponderous writing style will allow.

The Spanish electric market has two sorts of contracts for we household users. One is in the controlled market. The other is in the free market.

The controlled price varies from hour to hour. It's an almost incomprehensible pricing system; I certainly don't understand it. It's to do with supply and demand and with an auction between the big energy providers to decide on the price. There are only eight companies that offer contracts in the controlled Spanish market, they are the "Suppliers of Reference", and they are able to do so because they conform with certain government criteria. If you listen to the Spanish news and they tell you that today was the most expensive/least expensive day ever for electric prices, they are talking about this controlled price. If you buy a contract that uses the controlled price, you can never be sure whether your bill will be higher or lower even if you were to use the same amount of electricity under the same conditions.

Most people have a contract in the free market. "Anyone" can set up to sell electricity on to consumers in the free market. I presume it's more or less like that of any other business. If you're a supermarket, you buy your raw material, tomatoes say, from a producer, or their agent, at one price and sell them on to customers at a higher price. Normal capitalist economy stuff. Most supermarkets have tomatoes, the price varies from supermarket to supermarket and how they attract customers to buy them is up to each supplier. So with electricity, it's just the same. The companies that offer contracts to household users buy their electric off someone who generates it or from some intermediary, and then try to attract customers. How they package it up is how they sell their product. Most of the free market contracts have a fixed price for electric under certain conditions and for certain periods.

Electric bills in Spain have several elements. 

There's the power that you contract, the "potencia" - it's the thing measured in kilowatts. We have 3.54 kW. The more potencia you decide you need, the more you will pay each month. Often the cost of the potencia is lower at night and at weekends and more during the working day. 

Then there's the quantity of power that you use. The more power you use, the more you pay. That's why your partner/parent or children are always nagging you not to leave things on standby, to turn off lights, to raise the temperature on your fridge freezer, to buy a pressure cooker etc. etc. 

On top of this part of the bill, you pay a tiny, miserly, insignificant amount to the electric company to subsidise the bono social, which is the discounted price that is offered to people who might otherwise have problems paying their electric bill. Of course, you could see it as a subsidy to the electric companies, but let's keep clear of politics on subsidies and charity for the moment. 

The first subtotal on your electricity bill is made up of these three elements: power capacity, power used and the contribution to the bono social plus an electricity tax. I think this tax is to pay off a debt when the government subsidised the price of electric. I may be wrong. Maggie tells me I usually am.

The second part of your bill is made up of the "extras," which include renting the meter and things you may decide you need or not. One of the things we had on our free market, Iberdrola, bill was a sort of insurance against faults in the house wiring and for repair or replacement of certain white goods should they go phut. I'm sure that other suppliers have other extras.

Finally the subtotal for the energy/bono social/electricity tax is added to the subtotal for the extras and the whole lot then has IVA/VAT added to give us the total we will have to pay.

There have been lots of changes in the way that electricity is sold in Spain over the years. I don't think we had a choice of suppliers when we bought the house and if there was a choice of contracts I was unaware of that option. The company we contracted with was called Iberdrola and they simply renewed the contract each year. We were on the controlled price by default. When Putin started pounding the Ukraine the electricity price in the controlled market went crackers. Every day seemed to be a record high for the price of electric. We certainly noticed it in our bills. By now we were well aware that we had options and we asked Iberdrola what they could offer. I'd noticed, but not known why, the Iberdrola bill had, seamlessly and silently, transmuted into a Curenergia bill. Iberdrola sells in the free market while Curenergia is one of the Suppliers of Reference, selling in the controlled market. When Putin forced us onto the free market, we had to change suppliers to Iberdrola proper.

All of the free market contracts offer different pluses and minuses. The different contracts might offer electric at a fixed price every minute of the day or expensive electricity during certain hours balanced out by lower prices at other times. They may offer a fixed unit price over several years. Lots of them offer green electric though I wonder how anyone can determine where the electrons moving along the cables came from and as Spain seems to consider nuclear power to be as green as solar panels, wind turbines and hydroelectric there may be different ideas about definitions. There are often side offers; buy electric off Repsol, and they'll give you a discount at their petrol stations buy from someone else and they'll give you money off at the supermarket. 

So, back to where this blog started. Prompted by the radio tertulia I looked at the QR code which referenced lots of providers. From that I looked at some providers online, I talked to a couple of advisors one online and one face to face - both tried to sell me a contract with the same supplier. That supplier was not one of the ones that the National Energy Commission suggested as the best value. Amazingly, as if by magic, my Instagram and Facebook feeds also started to fill with adverts for energy suppliers - they must have some sort of sixth sense. It became obvious that changing from one contract to another was dead easy, and so I did.

Whether the decision was a good one or not, time will tell.

Electricity bills and borrascas

Here they are called Borrascas, I'm not sure what they are in English but something like storms or maybe Atlantic Lows. The storms that come in from the Atlantic and nowadays, just like hurricanes, have alternating and alphabetically arranged female and male names - Ana and Bertie, Charlotte and Derek. A little over a week ago Filomena, brought lots of snow which caused problems all over central Spain, particularly in Madrid, and low temperatures everywhere.

When it gets cold, and more so when it gets hot, Spain uses more electric. This is not a great surprise. The nuclear power stations never go offline but all the other forms of electricity generation have ups and downs. You can't pull so much from wind turbines if there is no wind, the solar panels don't work so well at night and even the hydroelectric stations are affected by droughts and rainstorms. When all else fails the gas and oil fired power stations are brought on line. The power generated from these fossil fuel plants is the most expensive to produce. Through some complicated mathematical formula a Spanish Government agency calculates the cost of generating each individual unit of electric at any given time. This fixed price is based on the most expensive generating capacity in use. So when the demand is so high that the gas and oil burning power stations are fired up the price goes up to match. This fixed price affects the bills of ordinary consumers. More precisely it affects the price of users in the regulated market because Spain has two sorts of domestic electric contracts: the regulated market and the free market

The energy market in Spain was liberalised years ago. When it first happened I looked around a bit at different providers and I couldn't see any advantages in changing. With the passing years, that situation has changed and I should have shopped around but inertia and I have always seen eye to eye. 

We don't get cold callers in Culebrón, actually that's not true, a couple of Witnesses turned up in 2005 and occasionally the melon man blows his horn outside the gate but, in general, peace reigns. I hear it's not the same in the big cities with an endless procession of smooth talking salespeople bearing electric and gas contracts pounding on people's doors. It's not something the telephone sales people try to sell us either.

Every now and again the price of electricity gets media coverage. Last week we apparently reached the highest price ever. The kerfuffle in the media made me curious and I had a look to see how it was all organised and what sort of contract we had.

Although the devil's in the detail there are, fundamentally, just two options for those properties with a supply of less than 10kw. The regulated tariff and the free market tariff. The regulated tariff uses prices per unit of electricity set by the government. This is the one that gets the media mention. This is the tariff that we have. If you're in Spain and you have this sort of contract your will have the letters PVPC somewhere on your contract or, if it's written in English, VPSC. It's Precio Voluntario al Pequeño Consumidor for those who are interested.

The second tariff, the free market tariff, is the alternative and it's available everywhere from over 270 providers. What the contracts offer, how much they cost and what they include and exclude is only limited by the ingenuity of the contract writer. Potential customers compare the various offers and sign on the dotted line for whichever option they think is best. My guess is that the permutations between the fixed costs, the unit price, inclusion of service contracts and other factors are almost boundless. This is where the price comparison websites must come into their own. If you need a supply of more than 10kw this is the only option available to you.

The regulated tariff, the one affected by the official government price, is only available from the eight power companies which are called Comercializadores de Referencia which, sort of, translates as the Reference Marketers. In the regulated tariff contracts the fixed or standing charges and the per unit price are separate. There are three options or modalities about how the units of power are offered and charged. Option one is that the charge is the same at any time of the day or night, option two is that the day is divided into two twelve hour periods with a higher and a lower price for each period and the last option is that the day is divided into three eight hour slots with three different prices per unit at the different times - the last one is particularly useful for people with electric cars to charge.

The Comercializadores de Referencia can also offer a fixed price annual tariff. In that case they tell you how much each kilowatt will cost during a calendar year and you sign up (or not) knowing that will be the price without being subject to the ups and downs of the market.

With trying to work out how our regulated bill was put together I read the bill properly for more or less the first time ever. Generally I just look at how much and when I have to pay. We get our electric from Curenergía which is a part of Iberdrola and I realised that they had already done most of the donkey work for me in the small print at the bottom of the bill. They do an analysis which gives comparisons between how much you have paid with your current modality and how much you would have paid under one of the other modalities. I still couldn't be bothered to go hunting around for the best deal on the free market but I did realise that simply by going to the sort of bill where the prices are different for each twelve hour period we could save maybe 100€ a year and I could do that online in a few minutes.

So I did.

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The photo by the way is from back in 2010 when I taught English to people who worked at this gas fired power station in Cartagena. The plant was later bought by Gas de France. I remember being told that the whole plant had been on standby for a whole year, not used at all, and that if they were needed it took a few days to bring the plant online.

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.

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.

Hot water

One of my first ever brushes with Spanish rules and regulations was when I decided that we needed a second butane bottle for the heater in the flat we were renting in Santa Pola. What now seems eminently sensible - that before you can start using bottled gas in your home somebody needs to check that the installation is safe - seemed very Orwellian back then. A future with a boot stamping on a human face - forever. All I wanted was to buy a gas bottle and they wanted to see ID, they wanted me to prove where I lived, they wanted me to sign a contract and they wanted a technician to visit to make sure it was all safe. Having lived here a long time now and having seen the news stories of blocks of flats destroyed with dodgy gas installations and having heard how insurance companies love to avoid paying out if you can't show proof of a current five year check or even if the rubber pipes are past their sell by date, then I am very happy to do as I should. Anyway, there was a bit of a loophole in the system, whilst Repsol, the orange bottle suppliers, wouldn't give me a contract without seeing the installation, the Cepsa people, who provide silver bottles, made me show ID and the like but gave me the bottle simply by signing the contract. It's such a long time ago that I forget the detail of why and how they justified the difference.

Living in the countryside has lots of advantages, less coming and going, less noise and a bit of outside space. It also has disadvantages. The main one is that it's a fair distance to the shops and suchlike but it has less obvious drawbacks like relatively slow Internet and a miserable electric supply of just 3.45kw. We realised, right from the start, that if we didn't want circuit breakers popping all the time then we should use non electrical appliances when good, non electrical alternatives were available. A gas hob for instance and a gas water heater. We also have butane heaters peppered through the house.

I've never doubted that the gas water heater was a good call. Well sort of. Gas heaters have a huge advantage that they just go on and on producing hot water. They are not like an electric immersion with a certain capacity. How many times have you had to wait for the water to heat after your mum, dad, sister, brother or a person from a non nuclear or non heterosexual family, one that doesn't perpetuate outdated stereotypes, has used up all the hot water with their environmentally unfriendly long showers? Not a problem with a gas heater - so long as there's gas and water it will produce endless hot water. 

Originally our gas water heater provided the water to our bathrooms and kitchen though sometime last year we got an under sink electric water heater for the kitchen because the wait for the hot water to arrive there, at the end of a long run, just got silly. The truth is that we have had a lot of trouble with the gas heaters. We've had two heaters now and, as I type, I can hear the plumber cursing as he drills through the 60cm thick wall to fit the inlet/exhaust pipe for number three! Just like the regular checking of the installation you have to use a registered fitter, at least legally, to fit any fixed gas appliance like water heaters or cookers. 

One of the reasons the heaters fail is all the limescale around here. The water is really hard and furs up the heater elements of electric water heaters and blocks the tubes in gas models. Over the years our first gas heater became less and less efficient. We'd get a plumber in, they'd clean everything out and we'd get back to a slightly less efficient normal. Eventually the services were making no difference and a luke warm shower on a miserable January morning is not a good way to start the day. So we bought heater number two. It was fine at first but then it started to have the same problems as the model it had replaced. We went through the same routine of getting it cleaned and fettled. We also had a problem with the electronic gadgetry which is supposed to deal with the ignition and temperature control. Local plumbers can't get the parts for the water heaters, so it has to be the official service people for spares. Given that the majority of brands have their service centres in and around Alicante they charge a big call-out fee and only venture into the rural wilds once each week. 

Last Sunday afternoon the water heater stopped firing up. It may be that it's just silted up but I suspect it's the electronics again and perming the reduced performance with the big call-out fee we went for heater number three. Sime brand this time, Italian I understand rather than the French Leclerc or the German Junkers that we've had before. We shall see.

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.

Country life

I've forgotten exactly what Ohm's Law says but I know that it gives you the relationship between current and volts and something else electrical. When I did know what it was I worked out that a 13 amp UK plug was getting stretched with a 3 kilowatt device, like a big electric fire or a fast kettle plugged into it.

Down in Cartagena our electric supply is 5.5kw, so two fully loaded 13 amp plugs worth. It's pretty typical for a newish Spanish house. If we're not careful with the cooker, kettle, heater combinations it's easy to pop the circuit breakers.

It's been horrid weather in Cartagena for the past few days and, when we got back to Culebrón it was cold, wet and windy here too. Because of the rain we haven't been able to hang out any laundry in Cartagena. In Culebrón we have a tumble dryer so we brought all the laundry back with us.

I set the washer going as we were still unpacking. A little later we turned on the tap to make the welcome home cup of tea but the tap spat and bellowed as spurts of water mixed with air exploded into the sink. Obviously the water had been off and when it did finally start to flow sensibly again the pressure was next to nothing. It was still bad this morning. My shower involved kneeling with one hand on the mixer tap.

Back on Friday afternoon the washer was bleeping. ERR 10 on the display. Maggie set it going again. The low water pressure had caused the machine a problem. The washer load done I loaded up the tumble dryer. In Culebrón we only have a 2.2kw electric supply but when we got the house rewired the sparks put in a circuit breaker board capable of dealing with 5.5kw. What this means is that the fuses hardly ever pop but that everything goes slower as more demand is put on the supply - lights dim, the air conditioner slows down and defrosting something in the microwave takes longer than driving into Pinoso to get the unfrozen version from the supermarket.

I'm on the Internet, it seems to be taking a long time to load something. I check the speed and we have 2.75mgb. We are way below the Alicante, Valencian or Spanish averages but at least we have broadband of sorts - not everyone around here does.

Geoff, who lives about 3km from us, phones me. He's been having trouble with his phone. His land-line, provided by some sort of radio system, has been on the blink. The mobile signal is weak, coverage is a bit dodgy. We have the conversation OK though.

It's always nice to come home. To get comfy on the sofa in front of the telly with our own things around us but there is no doubt about it that basic services in the Spanish countryside are miles behind the services provided to town dwellers.

Yellow bins, green bins and more.

Rubbish collection in Spain is pretty standardised. There are big rubbish bins, of various types, scattered at strategic points in cities, towns, villages and the countryside. The bins are emptied to some organised schedule - usually every night in the cities and towns - less frequently in country areas. Householders take their rubbish to the bin. Pinoso town is a little unusual in that it has a door to door collection most nights. There are big recycling bins all over the place too - the ones in the photo are our nearest in Culebrón village centre - and there are Ecoparques where you can take those hard to get rid of things like engine oil. For bigger things, old sofas and the like, you phone either the town hall, or the company that collects the rubbish on behalf of the municipality, and they, usually, cart it away for free.

I'd half wondered about the subject of this blog, with it's not very Spanish content, when I changed the printer ink the other day. I took the old cartridges with me to town for recycling at the mobile ecoparque which parks up by the Spar shop, in the middle of town, most Wednesdays. There was a class of school children there squabbling over free, "ecologically friendly" bags that were being handed out as recompense for listening to some sort of recycling presentation. Consumption as a way of reducing consumption always strikes me as being like going to the January Sales to save money by buying something you'd not thought of buying till it was cheaper. Hey ho, maybe I'm just a bit curmudgeonly.

Then I got another prod. I was listening to the radio. The piece was on the exhibition about Neanderthals, called Ancestors, at the Archaeological Museum in Murcia, an exhibition we made the mistake of not going to when we were there the other day. Apparently Homo sapiens lived alongside an estimated eight now-extinct humanoid type species.

So now I'm wondering if I can blog something that links humanoid extinctions to recycling.  Does it surprise you that sometimes people don't follow my conversational twists and turns - especially when I try it in Spanish?!

So we have three capazos just outside our house.  Capazos, are those big, bendy, rubber buckets. We use them as the staging post for things on their way to the recycling bins. Of the three one is for cartons, tins, wrappings and aerosols; that's to go to the yellow bin. The glass goes in the green bins and paper and card goes into the blue bin. We don't have the brown, organic waste, bins in Pinoso area.

Household recycling isn't big in Spain. I think that about one third of urban waste is recycled which is very low by European standards. We try to be good and recycle as we're asked but, to be honest, I think it's all a bit of a con. Don't get me wrong. I'm all for sensible recycling, and re-using, but I do think that if the manufacturers were less interested in reducing transport costs or how their products will display at the point of sale then a good percentage of the recycling would be completely unnecessary. When this comes up in conversation people usually remember taking pop bottles back for the deposit or the doorstep milk deliveries. I don't actually know how these things pan out if you take everything into account. Is it really better, when you consider manufacturing, transport, energy, materials and everything else, to deliver milk door to door or for us to go and get it from a shop in a vaguely recyclable container? It's not the sort of information that I have to hand. I'm sure you've had a similar conversation in the bar about whether electric cars and their toxic batteries are a good idea.

The reason I think recycling (and electric cars and lots more) may well be a smokescreen is that we live in a world where the overriding concern is making money. Nearly everything that goes on in the world is about rich people getting richer. I mean how did someone persuade us that all of these tiny efforts are about "Saving the Planet?". I'm pretty sure that, in the end, the planet will be fine. I don't think we - humankind that is -  will. In fact I'm sure our selfishness and greed will continue to cause the death of lots and lots of species and make even more of a mess of the planet. In relation to the life of the planet though our effect will be very short term. When we've taken out billions more animals and birds and insects in every conceivable way, from destroying the places they live and the food they eat through to strangling them with the plastic rings from six packs, then we'll do something similar to ourselves.  It may be that we will finally unleash our nuclear arsenal or we may just die coughing in a toxic atmosphere or buried under mounds of plastic. Nonetheless, do as we will, the planet will shrug us off and go on for quite a while yet. It will be different world, just as the world that the trilobites or ammonites or even the first jellyfish and sharks knew was a bit different. No dinosaur ever saw a car, a rubbish dump or an energy saving light bulb. The graptolites didn't need an environmental strategy and they never got together, in an as yet unbuilt and unnamed Paris or Kyoto, to lie to each other about what they weren't going to do. That's because graptolites didn't really do a lot of damage. People do a lot of damage but, until there is some sort of astronomical event that does for the Earth, swallowed by the ever expanding local star or something, the world will keep on turning and some sort of lifeforms will wander the land and oceans. 

So, back from the gigantic to the insignificant. Pinoso Town Hall, like so many others has started a composting scheme. The principal reason the Town Hall got in on the scheme is because it will help reduce their bill with the waste processing plant in Villena. It's easy enough to give the scheme a bit of an environmental spin though and, being quite gullible, I was quick to get involved. In return for going to a two hour talk they gave me a composting kit which had lots of gadgets but where the key parts were a bin for the kitchen, to throw the kitchen waste in, and a big composting bin for the garden. The melon rind and tea bags and all the gubbins from the kitchen get mixed in with the garden cuttings in the composter. The stuff doesn't have to be transported anywhere and Maggie already has plans for the compost to be used on a vegetable patch.

It's too late for the Golden Toad or the Passenger Pigeon and it's a bit unlikely that the composter will save the Javan Rhinoceros or the Red Tuna but I suppose it's not doing any harm either.

Winding up the genny

This house belongs to a couple of friends of ours. As you can see it's hardly in a built up area. In fact it's so far off the main road that normally, when we visit, they come and collect us in their four wheel drive to save our cars from crashing and bumping up the unmade road.

For most of Spain the model is that rural communities lived in villages. There are almost no individual buildings for miles on end in the Spanish countryside. Farm workers travelled from the villages each day to work the fields. Alicante province and some surrounding areas are different in that the houses are scattered around the countryside. I was told, that this is because the irrigation system, built by the Moors back in the first Milennium, made it possible for farmers to locate more or less where they wanted.

When things began to change the isolated nature of those country houses made it costly to supply them with mains electric and water. It's one of the reasons why so many rural properties were available to the Northern Europeans who have invaded Spain over the last two or three decades. They brought sufficient wealth from their homelands to run power lines and water mains in to these buildings and the Spanish owners were more than happy to swop their picturesque, but impractical, stone piles for enough money to buy a nice little flat in town. Gross oversimplification but basically true.

Not all the incomers were quite so wealthy and many traded off practicality for picturesque settings or stunning buildings. Their power is supplied by a mix of generators, solar panels and batteries and many have their water tankered in every so often.

Our friend's house isn't an old property but neither does it have mains electric nor water. It's a good place for John to practice his guitar though - not a lot of neighbours to upset.

Skating on thin ice

I'm going to tell you some things that I think Spaniards think about the British. You may notice the teensy weensy little flaw here. Actually though, when I say what Spanish people think I should change that to what several Spaniards have said to me, over the years, about Britain and the British. So my Englishness is not, really, a handicap. When I say Britain and the British, I actually mean England and the English. Occasionally the Scots get a mention, because of the supposed similarity to the Catalans and because Mel Gibson, like all Scottish men, wore a skirt. No Spaniard I've met has ever voiced their opinion about the Welsh or the Northern Irish. 

Lots of Spaniards think that we are the only country in the world that drives on the other side of the road. This belief is usually mixed with an undertone that suggests we English are a bit full of ourselves. After all, don't we use different measures for length and weight too? I know, as do you, that there are about 70 or so countries that do the same, road-wise, from biggish places like South Africa and Malaysia to small places like Belize. Faced with this reality, those Spaniards who know, point out that this is a probably a remnant of our thirst for Empire. Again, I often get a whiff of Spanish mistrust of British cockiness. They really want to remind me about Blas de Lezo.

Lots of Spaniards think that British food is terrible. The only typical English dish that most Spaniards know is Fish and Chips. You and I may think that Roast Beef and Yorkshire Pudding is well known, but it isn't. My comeback to any Spaniard who started on this journey used to be a list of lots of other traditional British dishes from Shepherd's Pie and Bubble and Squeak to Bangers and Mash or Steak and Kidney Pie. Later I changed tack. I would argue that, whilst pizza may be Italian in origin, it is now a world food. The list of pizzas available from a Spanish pizzeria is quite different to the list of pizzas available in a Nepalese or Neapolitan pizzeria. Following the same logic, I would point out the breadth of dishes, and restaurants, that litter the British landscape. We Britons have plundered the world's cuisine. We feed our children Mexican or Japanese without blinking. We have taken dishes from across the world and made them our own. British Chilli con Carne, Spaghetti Bolognese, Red Thai Curry, Chicken Tikka Masala and so on have very little in common with the original source dish (if there is one) but those dishes are now as British as The Elizabeth Tower and Big Ben. Anyway, what are we comparing? Half the world eats chicken and chips or steamed mussels.

Spaniards think that the UK has a terrible climate. They're probably right. I was in the UK for the first time for ages a little while ago and the greyness of the light was a bit of a shock to me. Mind you the Spanish seem to forget that Asturias and the Basque Country, in fact much of Spain, is hardly sun baked in Autumn and Winter and until the Mediterranean builders learn about cavity wall insulation, insulation in general, doors that fit and effective heating systems, the winter in the Med, inside at least, is always going to be less pleasant than winter indoors in the UK. 

Spaniards think that most British tourists are drunken louts keen to jump off balconies and be sick in the streets of Magaluf. Unfortunately, there's more than a seed of truth in that. The cultured Brit in Toledo, there to see the Velázquez, and the placidly normal family holidaying in Torremolinos, aren't so noticeable whilst the dildo wielding fat bloke in San Antonio is. Even more so now that socks with sandals and Bri-Nylon shirts have disappeared from most wardrobes.

This last one I would have forgotten about if it hadn't been for my barber. I was complaining about the skyrocketing price of electric and fuel in general. His response was that electric prices would hardly worry such a rich bunch as we old, retired Britons with our high pensions and massive accumulated wealth. It reminded me of our early years here when there were lots of stories of Spanish families being amazed that they were able to unload their inherited, white elephant, big, old, country house, miles from anywhere and without services, to Britons who ne'er raised an eyebrow at the plucked from the air, mickey take, of a price. Fortunately for us, post Brexit, it's the Belgians and the Dutch who have inherited that branding.

Colder than a well-digger's ass

I have a morning cat feeding routine. The kettle goes on as I run water to wash the cats' bowls. I fire up the portable gas heater. When the water has boiled I put a little of it into our tea mugs and then put the mugs on top of the heater. It's to warm the cups. If we don't warm the cups we end up with lukewarm tea. The kitchen temperature is such that crockery and cutlery come out of the cupboards icy cold.

The minimum temperatures recorded at the Pinoso weather station over the last week are -1.5ºC, -2ºC, -1.1ºC. -2ºC, +1.3ºC, -7.2ºC and -5.3ºC. It's not that they're arctic or anything but neither are they tropical. It has been colder. We had a couple of days last month when there was no morning water because of frozen pipes. Lots of shop and office workers in Pinoso work at their computers wearing coats. Several of our friends wear fleeces inside their houses. We're not for that. We're for banging on the heating. Maggie was so fed up of being cold a couple of years ago that she spent serious money on installing a pellet burner which now blasts 10kw of heat into our living room. We have portable 4kw gas heaters in the kitchen and as a back up in the living room too and there are electric heaters here and there. Since the temperatures began to drop we've bought ten 12kg gas bottles, twenty odd 15kg sacks of pellets and our December electric bill is 50% higher than the one in November.

The problem is that the heat is not background heat. It isn't on all the time. The insulation in our house, and in the majority of the Spanish houses that we know in this area, is so minimal that basically as heat is poured in it flies out. As soon as we turn off the heating the cold re-invades the house and, even when the heating is on in any one room the icy cold chill is waiting behind the door.

We don't leave heating on in the bedroom. The goose down duvet we use is really a set of a thinner and a thicker quilt. The two will fasten together and that's what we do in the depths of winter. It means that we can stay warm in bed. In fact it's a bit too hot and the duvet is uncomfortably heavy. I think we both follow the same routine. We wake up at something a.m. dripping in sweat, far too hot, we stick an arm or a leg out from under the covers till the exposed limb goes numb with cold and then we retreat under the covers and hope that the balance of body temperatures will allow us to get back to sleep.

Outside the daytime temperature is generally quite pleasant. I've thought that it has been colder recently than usual although I have no data to back up that. I'm just going on things like the feeling that I might die of cold as I rode the bike into work the other morning! If I were describing a typical winter's day around here I would describe a sunny day with a bright blue sky so the recent crop of grey days has been a bit out of character.

As I pick up a freezing cold knife from the cutlery drawer or as I gasp with cold on opening the door to the unheated office it's hard to recall those endlessly hot summer days when the cicadas sang all night long. But, what keeps me going is that I know they'll be back!

Braseros

It's not a complex idea. When I was a lad braziers were the natural complement to those little striped tents that workmen used to set up over what were then called manhole covers. In Spain they put them under round tables.

Braziers or braseros are, at their most basic, simple bowls which fit into a circular support underneath a round table. There are electric ones nowadays of course but the one we were presented with today, when we went for a birthday meal, was more like a wrought iron version of a parrot's cage. Glowing embers are put inside the bowl, the bowl is popped under the table and a heavy tablecloth draped over the table and your knees. The heat captured under the table warms the lower half of your body. A very personal sort of heater. The modern thermostaically controlled electric heaters do the same job and have the advantage over the old fashioned, real fire type. They don't either set fire to their users or poison them with carbon monoxide.

Ho ho ho

I mentioned that one of the local political parties "employs" a chap to help the Brit community. Today he sent around information about legislation that says we need to fit a limiting device to the electric supply. Apparently this limiting device was supposed to be installed by January 2010 with the power companies having an obligation to send a letter informing us of that responsibility. Obviously we haven't received the letter but I suppose it will be on its way soon.

I was vaguely aware of the legislation from some mumblings on the letters pages of the newspapers and from a conversation in a Spanish class but until the information today I hadn't checked the detail.

Lots of Spanish houses have really miserable power supplies by UK standards. Our house, for instance has a contracted supply of about 2.2kw which means that the circuit breakers should pop when we plug in the 3kw electric kettle. They don't because when we moved into the place we had it rewired and the sparks put in a board that would deal with about 5.5kw.

The main problem that we have is that the wire that brings power to the house is thin - it simply can't carry more power. The combination of the thin cable and bigger board means that we can run more than we are supposed to but that lights dim, kettles run slowly etc when we try draw more power than the cable can provide.

When we first moved in I tried to get the power company to upgrade the supply but the maximum we could have was 3.3kw. I talked to a Spanish electrician and his advice was to leave well alone. If we wanted a decent supply we would have to get the power company to beef up the supply and we were talking thousands of euros.

What's happening now is that the new device will limit us to the power we're contracted for. Try to draw more and the circuits breaker will pop. If we don't get the device fitted the bill will start to carry a penalty of around 15€ per month. We also probably need to get a certificate to say that our power supply is safe as the original certificate (which I've never seen) is obviously out of date because we had the wiring installation changed.

This could all get a bit sticky. Do as we should and we end up with stone age electricity. Do nothing and the fines will start to add up. Try to sort it out properly and it will certainly costs hundreds and maybe thousands.

Ho, hum.

Tealess for hours

A few years ago I used to take photos of houses and write the descriptions for an estate agency here in Spain. Often, if it were a house in the countryside, the sellers would tell me how they had spent loads of money on putting in piped water or connecting the house to the electricity grid. I had to be careful how I told them that all that money was irrecoverable. If they hadn't done it the house would have been worth less – off grid houses or with tanked rather than live water are less popular than the connected ones - but nobody pays extra because a house has electric and water. When you click the switch you expect the current to flow, when you open the tap there should be water. Utilities, like roofs, are things you expect in a house.

There was a little piece on the Town Hall website the other day about improving the water supply to some little hamlet and there was a picture of the pipe. It wasn't a very big pipe maybe 6 or 7cms in diameter. It wasn't very high tech either, just some thickish looking plastic pipe. I suppose that something similar feeds the water to our house. Yesterday though it didn't.

If there is leak on the householder's side of the water meter you call a plumber. If it's on the other side then you call the bloke who drives around in a big white Jeep and works for the Town Hall. He usually comes quickly, digs up the road and patches the leak. It happens from time to time.

I didn't worry too much when the tap was empty. The water pressure has been pathetic for a couple of weeks now and I presumed they were doing some routine maintenance to sort that out. Just to be safe though I sent a text to the Jeep man. I didn't ring because I didn't want to pester a man who might be, almost literally, up to his neck in it

Our Internet and phone connection had gone phut the day before. I suspected a general fault rather than a household problem. I used the WhatsApp group in the village to ask if other people were having problems. The answer was yes, which was both re-assuring and not at the same time. The phone and the internet connection came back. Somebody said a mast had collapsed but I don't know.

I must have been a bit too blasé about the water for Maggie's liking. She wasn't as confident as me. She used the same village WhatsApp group to ask about the water. Yes it was a general problem. A couple of hours later the water came sucking, blowing, popping and gurgling back. It was very cloudy and the pressure was pathetic.

We heat our water with a gas water heater powered by bottled gas. We chose gas because our rural electric supply is a bit on the feeble side. I thought we had the hot water supply secured but, this morning, the water pressure was so feeble that the water heater refused to kick into life. Cold shower or no shower were the options.

Civilization hanging by a thread or the delights of rural life in Spain?

Yes, yes, yes, yes - No

The story of the replacement of the roof of our house is a long and soporific one.

When we finally had the note from the architect last year to say the work was completed to his satisfaction we took it to the Town Hall. The paperwork was stamped. "Is that it, is it all done?" I asked. The Councillor who stamped the paperwork said it was all done. Our architect had said it was all done.

But I didn't trust either of them.

On the original notification of planning permission there was a clause to say that we needed a certificate of "First Habitation." Normally that's the certificate you apply for when you build a new house to show it's safe and to code and suchlike so you can get water and electric connected. We've lived in the house for five years so, obviously, it wasn't the first habitation of the house.

"Right," said the chief chappie in the planning office, "you need a certificate of first habitation, well that's what we call it - it isn't like a certificate of first habitation - after all you have water and electric and stuff - but that's what we call it. You need to bring me a bunch of papers, here's a list, once you've done that I'll pop out to see it and then we'll issue the certificate."

Being Easter the office is closed so we've asked someone to sort it out on our behalf.

Reading this is better than bedtime Horlicks.

Cars as social outcasts

I'm sorry but I have to admit to enjoying Joyas sobre ruedas on the Discovery Channel - Wheeler dealers in its original. That interest explains why I asked after the hire car of a couple of friends visiting from the UK. The car had a late letter L registration - well under a year old - but it didn't have one of the emision badges or stickers on the windscreen. I mentioned this and, not surprisingly, our friends were completely in the dark about the badges. I explained. It's basically an emission thing. The idea is that electric cars, hybrids, newer petrol and diesel cars can get stickers whereas older petrol and diesel cars can't. The environmentally cleaner your motor and the fewer restrictions. The older and dirtier your car the sooner it will be forced off the road.

I remembered the badges conversation when we were in Altea town centre. "Ah look, there'll be a badge on this car", I said, but there wasn't. I walked down a row of at least 50 parked cars before I got to one with a sticker. I was truly surprised. My car has one and I just presumed that it was in the majority. In fact I recently had a conversation with a Spanish chap who was really sad that the new legislation meant that he was going to have to replace his much loved, nearly 500,000 kilometre, but still going strong, SEAT Cordoba for something newer. Hypothetically, from 1st January 2023, all towns with a population in excess of 50,000 have a low emissions zone (ZBE) in place. That's now a date that has passed. In practice only Madrid, Barcelona, Pontevedra and Zaragoza have complied with their legal obligations. A handful of other towns are nearly there and will implement this year but lots of places, Murcia Region and the Valencian Community for instance, have absolutely nothing planned.

The stickers are the basis for cars and vans entering these low emission zones. Bear in mind that there are lots of exceptions, lots of ifs, buts and maybes. The system gives a 0 sticker to the non polluting cars - electric vehicles and the like. Hybrids and gas propelled cars get an ECO sticker. Petrol engined cars after the beginning of 2006 and diesels built after September 2015 get a C sticker. Petrol cars from 2001 and diesels from 2006 get a B sticker. Older than that and you don't get a sticker. As I said lots of exceptions and lots of technical definitions. Look somewhere official if you need real detail.

There are 149 towns that have over 50,000 people in Spain. If this legislation had actually been implemented on time and you owned a nicely turned out, 2005, 2.7 litre diesel Jag S type you wouldn't be able to drive into them. Locally that would keep you out of Alcoy, Petrer, Orihuela, Torrevieja, San Vicente, Benidorm or even Molina de Segura never mind the obviously larger places like Alicante, Elche or Murcia.

The plans are in the hands of the local town halls so the what, where and how will vary from place to place. In Barcelona for instance the restrictions cover nearly all of the city but in Madrid it's just the very small area inside the M30 ring road. The idea is to use cameras to identify, and later fine, cars that enter the areas they shouldn't. Fines in Madrid and Barcelona are at about 200€ with discounts for early payment. These two cities give a clue to how other places will behave. The 0 cars enter and leave at will and street park if they can find somewhere. The B and C cars can enter but have to use designated car parks and even the ECO cars can only street park for a maximum of 2 hours. Residents currently get the right to enter the restricted areas with any old car but that right will be phased out over time. It's pretty easy to see the thinking behind this. If you're poor, with an old banger then you get the chop first. The better off, with a newer motor, get a reprieve for their combustion engines for a while but, until people abandon fossil fuel, the restrictions will bite harder and harder. 2030 is the first target date for real controls and by 2050 combustion engines will be a thing of the past. Indeed in the EU the plan is that new combustion engine vehicles will not be sold after 2035. 

It's probably true too that the idea of private car ownership is already a bit passé. Different ways of getting about urban areas for individuals and rethought schemes of planning and coordinating public and group transport for longer trips are on the way. Unless the sixth extinction event gets here first. Until then it's not difficult to get the stickers. You go to the Post Office with your Permiso de Circulacion for the vehicle in question and your ID for the owner of said vehicle - something like your TIE, DNI or, I suppose for non residents with cars parked here, their passport and NIE.

The impetus for this blog was my surprise at realising that so few cars have the sticker. It is not intended as a guide to the legislation. For good information go to a reputable source, like the DGT website or, for something in English, maybe the N332 Facebook page.

We should have known

Electric prices in Spain have just gone up. The overnight, low tarrif has been abolished. Bad news, but no, good news. Poor people with limited electricity supply no longer have to pay the standing charge.

Electricity supply in the countryside in Spain is a bit hit and miss. Pinoso, the town, didn't get electric till 1974 and the supply was very limited. Most houses had supplies of just 1.1kw - enough for the lights but not for much more. Over the years of course the situation improved and the standard now is to have a supply of 5.5kw - still low by UK standards but useable enough.

The cable that supplies power to our house isn't thick enough to carry 5.5kw and our contract is for just 2.2kw. The standing charge for the supply is based on the contracted power so we pay less for our 2.2kw than someone who has a contract for more.

One of the changes with the new increased charges was that people who contracted less than 3.3kw would no longer have any standing charge at all. It looked like the increases were actually going to benefit us. There's a catch though. When we had the house rewired the electricians put in a fuse board that allowed us to draw more power than we were actually contracted for. Effectively we had a beefier power supply than we were paying for. And Iberdrola, our power supplier, isn't stupid. They know there are lots of people like us so one of the conditions of the "no standing charge" is that there has to be a circuit breaker fitted that would limit the amount of power we could draw. As we like tea, and need to boil the water, we wont be getting the circuit breaker fitted. So we'll continue to have to pay the standing charge. Phooey!

Excuse me, what am I paying for?

The majority of the local taxes in Alicante are collected by an agency called SUMA. So the water bills, the rubbish collection, car road tax and the equivalent of the council tax all come from SUMA despite actually being set by the local Town Hall in Pinoso.

SUMA, in my experience, is an efficient organisation. I pay most of my bills by "direct debit" and SUMA's notifications always come a couple of weeks before the due date reminding me to check that I have sufficient funds in the bank etc. So unlike the banks, phone company and electric people who just take the money on random dates often without notification (though to be fair the phone and electric people have improved recently) SUMA do it the correct way.

So the other week a notification arrives that says that there has been a bit of a cock up on their part and that for some tax period they have either made an error in or forgotten a charge relating to sewerage and sewage charges. The language is the archaic stuff of official documentation and there is no date set on which they intend to take the payment (only 42€) though there is a section which tells me my rights should I wish to challenge this ruling. My guess is that this is notification that there will be a charge and that shortly they will send an actual bill.

Now we got new drains in Culebrón a while ago but ours was one of the six houses that was left out of the scheme. I could see a link, new service, new charge. So I wrote an email to them asking what the charge was and whether it applied to us as we don't have any drains. Their reply came back in a couple of days (another good sign, most Spanish organisations don't respond to email) though it offered no explanation except to tell me the official routes for lodging a complaint. Those routes include going into an office, using their virtual office (which requires an electronic signature) or sending the official form which has to be validated in a post office before the envelope is sealed.

I have two forms of electronic signature on my computer but neither of them will get me past their gate-keeping. Going to an office is a bit tricky as their working day and mine don't mesh and sending an official complaint by post seems a bit drastic. All I really want to know is what I'm paying for and whether it's a one off charge or an annual increase.

I've just spent an hour or so writing the few lines in Spanish (checking and rechecking grammar and phraseology takes me ages) to try to explain what I'm after, saying that I'm not after any sort of privileged information so we don't need the secure measures that they are asking for etc.

This could be the real test as to whether SUMA really is more human and one notch easier to deal with than the majority of Spanish bureaucracies. It would be so nice if they just did the decent thing and replied with a nice simple explanation in everyday language. Somehow though I doubt that will be the case.

Monday update: Not only have they replied (well done boys!)) but they've also said it's probably a mistake and I should appeal the decision as it's a recurring payment.

Watery stuff

Artemio is a heavy set bloke who works for Pinoso Town Hall. Usually he has a big cigar clamped between his teeth. I'd prefer not to commit to giving him an age. He drives a Jeep which, he says, is much better than the Land Rover he used to have but, as you can see from the snap alongside, the Land Rover is still with the team. Artemio's  voice is raspy and, until the second or third sentence, when I tune in, I find him really difficult to understand. Artemio is the bloke you call if there is a water leak out in the street, or in our case, on the track. It's a 24 hour a day service. Should you ever need it the number is 656978410. If the leak is on the domestic side of the water meter then you need a plumber but if the leak is on the other side of the meter you call Artemio. Or rather you call his number. He's in charge of the team and he's not always the person who turns up.

Most people expect that when they click the switch on the wall the electric light will come on and when they open the tap water will come out. In rural Spain that's not always the case. I suppose in rural Scotland it could well be the same. If you live a long way from power lines or water pipes then you're on your own. We have mains water and mains electric but not everyone in the countryside has. People have water storage tanks which have to be filled up from time to time by tanker lorry and lots of houses run off solar power either for environmental reasons or because they have no economic option.

Piped water around here comes as two variants. The stuff we have is drinking tap water. It comes filtered and treated. There is another network of water supply organised locally by S.A.T. Aguas de Pinoso, la Sociedad Agraria de Transformación. That network is designed for crop irrigation but, because it runs in places where the drinking water network doesn't some people use it as their primary water source. I think that it is basically filtered but I don't think it's suitable for drinking. That said I've made tea with it presuming that the boiled water would be safe. I wrote that section without checking the detail. I think it's correct but if it isn't I apologise now.

So, the last time I called Artemio was because I'd cut through a thinnish water pipe when I was hacking out weeds alongside our track. It turned out that it was a pipe our neighbour had laid himself to water his almond trees so I had to ring Artemio back and cancel. The time before that it was the public water supply and the water bubbling up through the soil was in the same place that it has bubbled up time and time again. "It's 30 year old pipe," said Artemio, "what do you expect? It goes time after time and we patch it up time after time too".

Interesting that about the pipe. We had a leak on our side of the water meter the other day. We got the original leak fixed and then the pipe, which is sort of semi rigid rubber, not quite the Durapipe type but not as flexible as hosepipe, sprang a pinhole leak. When I tried a temporary repair with some potty putty type epoxy resin the pipe sprang another leak. When the plumber finally got around to visiting he said that the pipe lasts for so long and then starts to fail; as if it had a sell by date. He also said that the piping which had failed, the stuff he was replacing, was thin walled agricultural pipe rather than the thicker walled domestic supply pipe. From the outside they would look identical if it were not for the blue pinstripe on the domestic stuff. He thought that we may have the thinner walled pipe from the meter to the stopcock in the house. He cheerily suggested that if it were beginning to go it may have reached the end of it's useful life. "Keep an eye on your meter." he said. 

I do check the water meter every week. I've heard far too many stories about unrecognised leaks leading to huge bills. I also pondered the pleasures of house ownership.

Routine

I try to be frugal with toilet paper. One sheet at a time if possible. It's not because I'm particularly mean, it's because toilet paper blocks up Spanish drains. I've never quite been able to bring myself to do that thing you are instructed to do so many times in Spanish "public" toilets, the ones in bars and the like, to put the soiled paper in the wastebasket. It just seems a bit too close to living in a cave and wearing skins.

That primness caught us out once though and we had to have the floor ripped up to clear the blockage. In order for that not to happen again I now go around our three bathrooms each week and tip buckets of water down the toilets, clean the hair from the plugholes and other routine things to avoid a reoccurence. When we have houseguests who use up a couple of toilet rolls in a weekend I'm hard pressed not to reprimand them sternly.

Our house is old but it's a bit like that bucket that has a new handle, a new bottom and a rewelded seam - there's not much of the original left. Almost everything has been rebuilt or altered while we've been here. We don't live in some sort of back to nature existence, we may have a cesspit and our electric supply may lack a bit of oomph, by British standards, but it's perfectly normal herabouts. Sometimes the low power needs to be taken into consideration. The pellet burner ignition system, for instance, seems to need all the power we have to set fire to the fuel so we have to remember not to boil the kettle until the pellets are aflame. Once it's lit though we can boil kettles, run tumble dryers and what not to our hearts content.

Obviously every house needs its routines. Cleaning out that pellet burner or changing the beds or doing the laundry are the sort of repetitive tasks that people do the world over but there are certain things that I do, on a regular basis, because of where and how we live.

For example I clean the leaves and other detritus from the drain in the back patio every month because one time, when the need to do so had never occurred to me, the torrential rain was too much for the semi choked drain and in minutes the yard turned into a paddling pool which lapped into our living room.

I check the water meter every week to make sure that we are using about the same amount and that the meter isn't spinning when we don't have any taps open. It hasn't happened to us but the stories of underground, unseen, tubing splitting and spilling water unchecked for weeks or months are legion. And the resulting water bills are eye watering. 

Whilst we're on pipes our water often used to freeze up when it got cold in Winter. The pipe runs along the side of a North facing wall so I put some foam insulation around the exposed pipe. That seemed to do the trick. No frozen water. But the plastic of the insulation didn't cope well with the weather and it soon split. So I added more insulation and then taped the whole lot up in the time honoured, WD40 or duct tap to fix everything, manner. Every month, I check that the foam and the tape are OK and I usually end up with a happy half hour balancing on a stepladder to rebandage the pipe. 

I'm not sure whether this falls into the same class. This may well be more like checking the tyre pressures and oil on the car or pruning the trees, raking up the leaves and hoeing out the invincible weeds. Just a routine. But our palm tree is under constant threat from the picudo rojo, a beetle type creature, that flies around looking for a place to lay eggs. Once the eggs hatch the larvae feast on palm trees. Every six weeks I strap on a backpack spraying kit and douse the tree.

I discovered a new routine just yesterday. We have a gas water heater for the showers. It started to cut out after a couple of minutes. Naked with soapy hair and freezing water is horrid. I was just about to call out the repair people when I realised that it only happened when I changed from tap to shower. The water here is hard. That's why I clean or change the inlet filters on the water supply every three months to keep the amount of limescale in the system down. If you don't clean out your kettle or use anti-lime tabs in your washing machine then you'll soon notice. Everything furs up. People are always having to change electric water heaters because the elements are, effectively, covered in stone. The problem in the shower was that when the water flow diminished some sort of safety mechanism cut in on the gas heater. All I had to do was clean out the shower head and the taps and it seems to have sorted the problem. I've put that job onto a four week cycle in my diary.

I don't remember doing anything of a like nature when I lived in the UK. Periodic jobs obviously but a routine to avoid potential problems, no.