Three Weeks In, Part Two

So, about that difficult move-in. One thing we’d expected, because we’ve done our research, was that it was going to be cold in our house for some period of time after we moved in. the reason for this was very practical; our house was going to be empty for at least two months before we moved in. Moreover, the way Portugal handles electricity is very different from how it is in the United Sates. Mainly, Portugal meters out electricity, metaphorically, like pipes of water rather than a big puddle that everyone can take from as they need. I guess people like this because it forces them to keep everything under a very specific amount of power used at any one time, so the central power grid never gets overloaded. Americans usually have trouble with this because we are seen as energy hogs. One example showed a family trying to run multiple computers, with the teen son watching TV, the parents listening to a stereo, the daughter drying her hair, and Mom using a vacuum cleaner. Doing so all at once is pretty much guaranteed to blow a circuit in Portugal, no matter how large your house. In fact, our AirBnB had a card slot right by the front door, like some hotels do, so you could shut off all the power in the place just by removing the card. Very smart if your aim is to conserve power as much as possible.

In any case, one of our first purchases on our first day, before we even moved in, was two oil-filled heaters, much like portable radiators to provide slow steady heat. These got delivered to us the very next morning, which was fantastic because then we could start heating the house. We thought that would be fine even if it seemed to be slow to warm. The very first night was terrible: I was trying to read wearing a t-shirt, a long sleeve shirt, my hoodie, a scarf, and my polar fleece jacket with a blanket wrapped around my legs over my wool socks and shoes. Despite all that I was freezing cold. But we endured, trusting that it would get better . . . and it did. Slower than we could have wanted, but we warmed the central room over the next two days, then we were able to open up the two side rooms which will be our offices. All in all, it took almost a week to get our house up to a comfortable temperature. In our defense, we are pretty happy in temperatures that other people might find downright chilly. During winter, our old house was only heated more than 66* when we had company, and we cheerfully let the house cool down to 60 overnight. We’ve never tried to live in t-shirts and shorts during the winter.

Complicating this heating process was the peculiarities of power consumption in Portugal. That water pipe metaphor at the beginning? The thing about those pipes is that they aren’t one-size-fits-all; you contract with the utility for what the diameter of your pipe is (again metaphorically, just hang in there) as a separate issue from how much comes through the pipe. In other words, if you’ve contracted for a teeny-tiny pipe, it doesn’t matter how much electricity you are willing to pay for, it’s still going to come out in dribs and drabs. What this all meant is that we spent a chaotic day or two trying to play the game of exactly which electricity consumers we could run without tripping the fuses. Did you see the movie Apollo 13? If you did, remember the part where they were working out exactly which systems they could power up, in which order, so as not to ruin the mission completely? For slightly lower stakes, we were living that life. The real wild-card in the game was the electric water tank. When you take a shower it’s going to start up, no doubt. So if we were going to take a shower we’d shut off lights and maybe one of the heaters (I’m not kidding). However, those things also occasionally turn on to cook the water up a bit if it has cooled off. That’s random to anybody that’s not a water sensor in a hot water heater. Which means if we had crept up too close to the line, the water heater could flip on and then everything went dark. It was… an unpleasant couple of days.

In the end, however, it was simply difficult, not catastrophic. As you might expect, because our landlords wanted to keep the bills as low as possible while the place was vacant, they had arranged for the absolutely smallest pipes. It took some wrangling (for… reasons, the utilities remain in the landlords’ names, so they’re an extra link in the telephone game) but eventually everyone understood the problem. Figures, right about the time we got good at playing the Apollo 13 game, the pipes got expanded. Still, it’s nice to be able to keep listening to music and have a light on while the other one of us is in the shower. And while that was all going on, we were knocking out small accomplishments practically every day. Like what?

See you next time. 🙂