Some people may be interested in the impressively low rankings achieved by Italy in this year's World Bank Report on the ease of doing business in world economies.
We quite often have trips on our 3kw supply, maybe once every three or four weeks. The most frequent cause is that our washing machine is outside the house in the cantina so you forget (or one of us doesn't even know) that it's on, and switches on the electric kettle, oven or dishwasher. Most often it's the kettle. There's also a small power surge when our water pump switches on, so occasionally you get the weird experience of turning off the electricy by turning on a water tap - but only if we have a high load already. But there are many other causes, including guests with hairdryers. However it's something you get completely used to. It only takes a moment to reset the meter, though it helps to have a torch handy for when it's dark. Of course sometimes you find the meter hasn't tripped, and you have a power cut instead - as these are also not that uncommon. Time to light the candles, but the cut is often over before you've done this. The electric immersion heater is not normally a problem, as most of those sold in Italy use much less power than those in the UK. We only use this in summer anyway.
This site http://www.carbu.fr/ which is normally a way to find cheap petrol, is offering a way to find out about petrol station closures in France by Departement - click Accédez à la carte des stations fermées ou en rupture de carburants From a brief look, only a fairly small proportion are closed, and I didn't see any closed on autoroutes. Remember that in the UK there is always massive media hype about the extent of disruptions in France due to strikes and protests. Why not just go through France and fill up when you're half empty rather than empty?
Good idea, using your chippings/shreddings like this. Hope someone comes up with a good way of doing it. I haven't had any luck on a brief search. There seem to be quite a lot of commercial briquette presses available online, but not at domestic prices. At the other extreme is this; http://www.redsave.com/products/briquette-maker,,225?SOURCE=GOOG&KEYWORD=briquette+press&utm_source=google&utm_medium=cpc also sold by Amazon more expensively - it says it's for paper, but it might work with shreddings????
But if you are having this in the cellar, which is a very good idea if you can get a flue out of it, you do not want a stufa with central heating capacity but a specialist "caldaia a pellet". These are larger and usually uglier than stufe, with reservoirs which mean they keep going for several days or (with specialist equipment) weeks without reloading. There are quite a lot around, from the very expensive and probably most efficient and much easier-to-clean ones from German companies like Windhager and Weissman, down to much cruder and cheaper but still quite expensive ones from small Italian manufacturers. I have one of the latter - it does what it says on the tin, but it's a bit of a beast in some ways - the monthly cleaning of the boiler tubes (rather like rodding out the boiler on an old-fashioned steam locomotive) is one of my least favourite chores, though the weekly cleaning of the firebox with a specialist vacuum cleaner is quite easy.
This is TIM's current offer: http://www.tim.it/consumer/c56088/i56299/livello2standard.doYou would probably be better off buying a SIM-free modem, for example from http://www.nucleusnetworks.co.uk/3g-usb-modem/3g-usb-modem.htm - the initial purchase price may look higher than one with a contract from a mobile service, but you would then only need to buy a card for the actual times you are in Italy rather than being tied in to a yearly contract.Note that there is a much wider range of cards 'solo navigazione' on the TIM site above than initially appears on your screen - scroll horizontally using the blue arrows/bar at the bottom of the page to find the rest. The ones that work in gigabytes rather than hours are better value if you are downloading small amounts of data such as email, streaming radio and normal browsing rather than watching YouTube!
Another voice for changing the format. In another username, I used to visit 'this' site almost daily, and post regularly Nowadays it's something of a yawn, and I rarely visit or post. I think that a good forum format allows you to scan what is of interest to you quickly, and caters better for the bird-brain habits we acquire using the internet. Of course, simply having a forum is not enough. The public part of the Anastasia forum is far more moribund than even the Italy 'community' (I wouldn't know about any private part), though it has not yet degenerated into the wonderful high farce which ended her first solo attempt.
Andrea Pollett's Teach Yourself Italian site seems to move around a bit, but is now at http://www.freewebtown.com/civis_romanus/i-ind.htm - good if you like a formal approach to grammar - I've found it very helpful in the past.He (?) has also got a much shorter Roman dialect site elsewhere.
Thanks - you're right, wouldn't help. I do exceed my 3 kw occasionally, but a restorer wouldn't help much in that situation as you'd have to turn something off anyway before it could work. I was particularly thinking of what sometimes happens in severe electrical storms (quite frequent around me), when again the ENEL circuit-breaker will sometimes trip, but only very rarely the internal one.
Excuse my ignorance, but how do these things work? Do they manage somehow to reset the manual tripswitch on the modern white external ENEL meters, in which case I might find one very useful? Or are they an alternative to an indoor salvavita, in which case it'd be no use to me at all - it's always the external ENEL switch that trips.
This sort of panel fence probably doesn't exist in rural Italy because it would have no purpose other than the purely decorative. It certainly wouldn't keep out wild boar and badgers. If you want fencing panels that have a chance of doing that, they're on sale at any builder's yard. Reinforcing mesh is just the job - cut it to size with heavy-duty bolt cutters.
Comments posted
We quite often have trips on our 3kw supply, maybe once every three or four weeks. The most frequent cause is that our washing machine is outside the house in the cantina so you forget (or one of us doesn't even know) that it's on, and switches on the electric kettle, oven or dishwasher. Most often it's the kettle. There's also a small power surge when our water pump switches on, so occasionally you get the weird experience of turning off the electricy by turning on a water tap - but only if we have a high load already. But there are many other causes, including guests with hairdryers. However it's something you get completely used to. It only takes a moment to reset the meter, though it helps to have a torch handy for when it's dark. Of course sometimes you find the meter hasn't tripped, and you have a power cut instead - as these are also not that uncommon. Time to light the candles, but the cut is often over before you've done this. The electric immersion heater is not normally a problem, as most of those sold in Italy use much less power than those in the UK. We only use this in summer anyway.
This site http://www.carbu.fr/ which is normally a way to find cheap petrol, is offering a way to find out about petrol station closures in France by Departement - click Accédez à la carte des stations fermées ou en rupture de carburants From a brief look, only a fairly small proportion are closed, and I didn't see any closed on autoroutes. Remember that in the UK there is always massive media hype about the extent of disruptions in France due to strikes and protests. Why not just go through France and fill up when you're half empty rather than empty?
Good idea, using your chippings/shreddings like this. Hope someone comes up with a good way of doing it. I haven't had any luck on a brief search. There seem to be quite a lot of commercial briquette presses available online, but not at domestic prices. At the other extreme is this; http://www.redsave.com/products/briquette-maker,,225?SOURCE=GOOG&KEYWORD=briquette+press&utm_source=google&utm_medium=cpc also sold by Amazon more expensively - it says it's for paper, but it might work with shreddings????
But if you are having this in the cellar, which is a very good idea if you can get a flue out of it, you do not want a stufa with central heating capacity but a specialist "caldaia a pellet". These are larger and usually uglier than stufe, with reservoirs which mean they keep going for several days or (with specialist equipment) weeks without reloading. There are quite a lot around, from the very expensive and probably most efficient and much easier-to-clean ones from German companies like Windhager and Weissman, down to much cruder and cheaper but still quite expensive ones from small Italian manufacturers. I have one of the latter - it does what it says on the tin, but it's a bit of a beast in some ways - the monthly cleaning of the boiler tubes (rather like rodding out the boiler on an old-fashioned steam locomotive) is one of my least favourite chores, though the weekly cleaning of the firebox with a specialist vacuum cleaner is quite easy.
This is TIM's current offer: http://www.tim.it/consumer/c56088/i56299/livello2standard.doYou would probably be better off buying a SIM-free modem, for example from http://www.nucleusnetworks.co.uk/3g-usb-modem/3g-usb-modem.htm - the initial purchase price may look higher than one with a contract from a mobile service, but you would then only need to buy a card for the actual times you are in Italy rather than being tied in to a yearly contract.Note that there is a much wider range of cards 'solo navigazione' on the TIM site above than initially appears on your screen - scroll horizontally using the blue arrows/bar at the bottom of the page to find the rest. The ones that work in gigabytes rather than hours are better value if you are downloading small amounts of data such as email, streaming radio and normal browsing rather than watching YouTube!
Another voice for changing the format. In another username, I used to visit 'this' site almost daily, and post regularly Nowadays it's something of a yawn, and I rarely visit or post. I think that a good forum format allows you to scan what is of interest to you quickly, and caters better for the bird-brain habits we acquire using the internet. Of course, simply having a forum is not enough. The public part of the Anastasia forum is far more moribund than even the Italy 'community' (I wouldn't know about any private part), though it has not yet degenerated into the wonderful high farce which ended her first solo attempt.
Andrea Pollett's Teach Yourself Italian site seems to move around a bit, but is now at http://www.freewebtown.com/civis_romanus/i-ind.htm - good if you like a formal approach to grammar - I've found it very helpful in the past.He (?) has also got a much shorter Roman dialect site elsewhere.
Thanks - you're right, wouldn't help. I do exceed my 3 kw occasionally, but a restorer wouldn't help much in that situation as you'd have to turn something off anyway before it could work. I was particularly thinking of what sometimes happens in severe electrical storms (quite frequent around me), when again the ENEL circuit-breaker will sometimes trip, but only very rarely the internal one.
Excuse my ignorance, but how do these things work? Do they manage somehow to reset the manual tripswitch on the modern white external ENEL meters, in which case I might find one very useful? Or are they an alternative to an indoor salvavita, in which case it'd be no use to me at all - it's always the external ENEL switch that trips.
This sort of panel fence probably doesn't exist in rural Italy because it would have no purpose other than the purely decorative. It certainly wouldn't keep out wild boar and badgers. If you want fencing panels that have a chance of doing that, they're on sale at any builder's yard. Reinforcing mesh is just the job - cut it to size with heavy-duty bolt cutters.