Idle Thoughts

This was my first long stay at the house in Spain. Until then my visits had been mainly to check on the progress of the building work. My goals for this visit were to get the utilities back on, deliver the furniture I had brought down and get a bit of astronomy done.

The first night was not much fun as I arrived at 5 a.m. and had arranged to meet the estate agent (Steph) and her interpreter friend, Ivana at Benamaurel town hall at 11 that morning. The lack of sleep was only one factor - it had also been raining for a large part of the previous month, so when I got to the house I was paddling through mud to get to the front door - and more mud walking from where I parked in Benamaurel to the the meeting place. There were two things to do here: get the water sorted out and have the electricity turned back on, we managed 50%, which I’m prepared to call a victory. It turned out the water had been cut off because someone had reported a leak which turned out to be on the water company’s side of the meter and therefore their responsibility. However, instead of fixing the leak, they had cut the plastic supply pipe and folded it back on itself, thus cutting off the water. The water supply seems to be controlled from the town hall and a few enquiries uncovered the Fontanero (plumber) who handles the water utility who agreed to come over the next working day, Monday at 11:00 to reconnect my supply.

Getting a solution to the electricity problem was more complicated. The town hall couldn’t help with this, so the four of us (Steph, Ivana, myself and Casimiro - who I’d bought the house from and hadn’t/couldn’t/didn’t know-how-to notify the utiltiies that he’d sold the place) went in convoy to the Sevillana offices in Baza, about 20 minutes drive away. After waiting our turn in the office for an audience with a completely disinterested desk-jockey we were told that we, or more to the point: I, had to pay the outstanding amount (about €110) at a specific bank in town, get a receipt from them then come back. This we duly did and got the summonses cancelled. We were then told that we couldn’t have the electricity supply restored as the installation didn’t comply with new regulations. The reason was that electricity installations are supposed to be inspected every 20 years and this usually only happens when a property is sold and the account is changed. In my case I needed to provide a boletin, which is essentially a certificate declaring that the wiring is safe and I also needed to have a new, compliant electricity meter installed. My old meter, like a almost all in Spain, was on the outside wall so it can be read without needing access to the house. At some point in the past the regulations had changed so that new meters (and I now needed to get a new meter) had to be in a cabinet that fitted flush to the wall - not just in a box attached to the outside.

When I got the house rewired 6 months earlier, I was made aware of the need for a boletin and was told (remember things I have learned #5, it applies to anyone who wants your money) that it would be “no problem” to get. In fact, like in the UK, electricians are only willing to certify their own work as they can’t possibly know what other contractors had done. As it happens Casimro knew someone who knew someone …. So, off we went to meet “someone”. This someone came over to my house that afternoon to size up the situation. With him speaking spanish and me speaking english we drew lines on the walls which were the place for the new meter box (that I had to cut the hole for, since it was my house and my wall) while he would come back the next day to fit the new meter. This have me a chance to get out my new SDS drill and do some damage to the outside of the house. The end result was a pretty good, though I say it myself: a rectangular, regular and level section excavated out of the breeze-block wall on the front of the house and a channel through the concrete, under the front door frame to the fusebox just inside the house itself. With that job done, since the water was still disconnected, I needed to make a lightning trip into town to buy as much bottled water as I could carry.

“Someone” duly came back the next morning and let me know that the hole wasn’t deep enough - even though I’d made sure to meet the 20cm depth he specified: oh well, get out the drill again. While I deepened the hole someone improved my channelling and we soon had hole that met his needs. He then installed my flush-fitting meter box (note: box, not the meter itself) and installed wiring to it from the inside fusebox, gave me a filled-in and stamped boletin, charged me €650 and left. The electricity still wasn’t back on.

The first afternoon was spent setting up the generator. I decided to keep it in the garage as this meant it was protected from the weather and the garage walls reduced the noise to some extent. It did mean that the garage filled up with exhaust fumes, so whenever I wanted to turn the generator off I had to hold my breath, duck in, switch it off and get out before I ran out of air. Having the generator in the garage did mean I had a long run of cable back to the house. It also meant there was a limit to the number of appliances I could run at any one time: so I could use either the kettle or the fan heater or later on, the immersion heater.

On Monday at 10:55 something amazing happened. The Fontanero turned up, followed a few minutes later by the agent and interpreter. I’m not sure if it will show up in the future, but this extract from Google maps shows the damp patch in the front yard of the house (dead centre of the satellite photo). The fontanero told me, through Ivana, that the pipe up to the stopcock had split and therefore he had cut the pipe and folded it back on itself to stop the water. To restore the supply he just attached a new section of plastic pipe from where he had cut it and ran that over to the stopcock. The custom in Spain is for the water pipe to be just buried in the ground so he left me to bury the new section and to make good the run up to the stopcock. Later on, when I did this work I found that the pipe is just a couple of inches underground - whether that is deep enough to avoid frost damage I don’t know. [update Oct 2007: After repairing another leak myself I reckon the problem is when vehicles run over the pipe as it’s just too close to the surface.]

With the water back on (and 30, 5litre containers of potable water that I had bought on Saturday) we started on the second task of the day. With the boletin in my pocket, the three of us headed back to Baza and the offices of Sevillana, the electricity company. Back in front of senora desk-jockey, Ivana did all the talking. The outcome was that with the a few forms signed we got an undertaking that at some unspecified time in the future someone would come up to my house and install a new electricity meter and then I would be connected back to the electricity grid - until then I was reliant on the generator.