In Portugal, homes have a smart connection to the power grid via a sophisticated control box near the power inlet. The power utility can remotely read power consumption, and can shut off power too. There is a monthly charge based on your contract consumption ceiling. Your consumption is how much power your home is using at a given time, and the ceiling acts like a circuit breaker for the whole house. Last Friday, January 25, we had another power cut in the late afternoon. This time we couldn't get the power back on even with repeated resets at the control box and turning off the water heater to reduce our consumption. We dejectedly headed out for dinner in the pouring rain with a dark, cooling house.
We got together after dinner with our expat group at the regular Friday meeting. Attendance was down a little due to the rain, but we had a good time meeting a few new people and making some more contacts. There was plenty of commiseration on our blackout blues. People have been through it, and we all agree that it's a little strange that the power company would cut off your power entirely if you exceed the maximum power specified in your contract. Why can't they just charge you more if you go over?
We slept well in our unpowered house. It doesn't get seriously cold in this temperate climate, even in January, and our bedclothes are cozy. The next morning (Saturday) Gerrit ventured out to the control box, reset it, and the power stayed up this time. He started adding up the power consumed by various appliances in the house: heating/AC units, stove and oven, pool skimmers, washing machine, water heater, water pump, refrigerator, and so forth, and realized we very likely were occasionally exceeding our contract maximum power of 6.9 kilowatts, which was what the power company rep said was average for a 2-person home. This is not an average home though, electrically speaking. Or any other way, frankly.
So we cut back consumption to the minimum and the power held up all day. We also asked Nia, our fixer, to crank our contract up to 20 kilowatts, which is what we discovered the former owners had. That should happen on Monday and will give us a little headroom and hopefully put these power cuts in the rear-view mirror.
Later in the afternoon
Here is a little observation we learned from Caroline and Peter, the Brits who sold us the house. After Brexit, they could no longer stay in Portugal more than 90 days in any 180 day period. That's the Schengen rule which the EU maintains for citizens of non-EU countries like England now is. That made it impossible to spend the time here that they wanted and were used to, and was a key factor in their selling the house. We have therefore directly benefited from Brexit and from their loss. Strange thought. They have been awfully gracious and helpful, considering all that. They paid one last visit Saturday afternoon and we could tell they were kind of heartbroken.
On Sunday a big rain and wind storm moved in. But when the going gets tough, the tough go shopping. We made our way back to
But the real reason we went to El Corte Inglés was to make up for our not taking pictures of our lunch last time. Here's a replay:
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We had a few odd power outages that night after we got home, due to the high winds. The power winked out about five times for a few minutes and then back on, but held up other than that. We've seen this power behavior in the US occasionally, but not quite as many in a row as on Sunday night.
We were still wary of using the heater/ACs here until we can get our power ceiling raised. Gerrit tried twice to light a fire, but the winds were so strong they whistled down the chimney and filled the front room with smoke. He ran to open a couple of our huge window/doors to blow it out, and within seconds rain came pelting into the room, blown horizontally about 3 meters in (10 feet). What a mess! We mopped most of that up, gave up on the fire, and curled up in the living room to watch the storm with some glasses of wine. It was pretty dramatic!
The following day, Monday January 27, the storm was still raging but had died down considerably. We had left most of our goodies from yesterday in the car and garage, being too whupped to bring them in the previous night, so we watched for a rain break. We got one in the late morning and quickly lugged everything inside, just before the rain began again. Now we had lots of things to do inside! With the winds abating Gerrit could get a fire started, and we enjoyed that all day.
On one of her trips lugging stuff inside, Pat gathered about two dozen ripe oranges from one of our trees. We've been enjoying oranges for breakfast, lunch, and bedtime snack, and now she can juice away and freeze the delicious nectar too.
In the afternoon we received confirmation that our power ceiling had been raised to 20.7 kilowatts, so we celebrated by turning the main room heater on and letting the fire die out. We should see no more of those mystery cutouts while the rest of the neighborhood is fine, only cutouts for actual power failures. The extra monthly cost is only €35 ($37) above the old contract, with the energy cost per kilowatt-hour the same.
(As usual, you can click on any photo to enlarge it, scroll through them all, and click outside a photo when you're done. Also, you can click on the bold underlined phrases to play the audio.)