In Another Place, someone recently asked for advice about buying an above-ground swimming pool. I suggested that, if he'd never owned a pool before, he might get a better idea of the work involved in maintaining a swimming pool as well as the posi
According to the registration documents, our 2.5 litre diesel Navara is rated at 126 kilowatts, which is apparently 196 horsepower.That is indeed a bit more ooomph than that possessed by your typical Ford Focus. Tables on Parker's suggest it could be as much as twice the power (with, of course, the concomitant increases in fuel consumption and exhaust emissions).I have no idea why we're paying less that we would if we had a Fiat Panda diesel. The registration document is far from being as clear as it might be, but I can see nothing obvious on it indicating that the Navara is considered special in some way. But perhaps it is. I dimly recall hearing that they were considered good value in Britain at one point because they weren't considered "normal" cars when it came to calculating Road Tax. Suppose the same might apply here.Whatever the case, I really would not recommend that anyone get a vehicle the size of ours unless they had a definite, practical need for it. We have it because we live on a farm in an area which can get a lot of snow. I don't regret buying the Navara, but it is expensive to run and it can be a a bit hair-raising now and then when driving it around Italian cities.Al
We have a Nissan Navara 4WD pickup with a 2.5 litre diesel engine.Last year, Italian road tax was less than €65. The Agenzia delle Entrate calculator says we'll be paying the same next year.I just used the Parker's website Road Tax calculator and it said I'd be paying £405 Road Tax this year if the car was registered in the UK. Next year, the cost will be £435.Of course, if I was running the same car in Britain, I'd also be paying about £250 a year for insurance instead of €1,000 (an amount that seems fixed and never decreases, even though I've never had an accident in Italy).If you're on a budget, I suspect that the cost that may be the main determining factor in what sort of car you run is how much you will pay for insurance, not the Italian road tax, which is really just a token amount.Since it's marginally relevant, I repeat my favourite Italian road tax story. A year after I bought our car, I decided to renew the road tax, so I visited an ACI office to sort this out. It was only at this point that I learned that the car dealer had handed over an untaxed car and I'd been driving without tax for a year. The fine was something like €7 plus interest. That evening, while watching a UK TV channel on satellite, the DVLA advert showing a car being crushed because it was didn't have a valid tax disk was shown. That says something about the two countries, but I'll leave it to you to figure out what.Al
Bear in mind that, during the period when your grandparents entered the USA, it wasn't unusal for the names people used in the USA to be different to the names the immigrants had used in their countries of birth.Apparently it's an urban myth that names were frequently changed by Ellis Island immigration officials, but mistakes were made by shipping company officials before the immigrants boarded ship and it wasn't uncommon for immigrants to choose to change their names to something less obviously "foreign".This was probably more often the case with immigrants from Eastern European countries than for Italians but, given what Russ says above, are you certain beyond all doubt that the surname your grandparents used when they lived in Abruzzo was "Angelo" and not "D'Angelo"?Al
The devices being discussed here are for use in conjunction with an RCD (commonly called a salva vita in Italy). This isn't a normal circuit breaker that trips only if there's a major fault, but one so sensitive to an imbalance in the electrical current on the two wires of the supply that it will turn off the electricity so quickly that you won't feel anything if you should be daft enough to grab a live wire while standing barefoot in the shower.Unfortunately, this sensitivity also means that they seem to trip if there's an imbalance on the wires supplying electricity to a house, as will happen often in rural areas of Italy with its long stretches of electric lines running above ground, since these are subject to all sorts of electrical interference.So, no, they're not really an alternative to the normal salva vita, more an improvement on the normal sort.Unfortunately, I really doubt if one would do anything to sort out your problem with the ENEL meter circuit breaker tripping. If that happens to you regularly and the circuit breakers and RCD on your side of the meter never trip, I suspect you either have a faulty meter circuit breaker or - more likely - you're simply exceeding the current which your contract with ENEL allows you to draw.Al
We've often had problems with a RCD (aka "salva vita") tripping for reasons that seem to have nothing to do with electrical equipment in the house, most recently a couple of days ago when we had some fairly strong winds during the night.So I'm certain you're not the only one with the problem, but I didn't respond because you asked to hear about people's experiences with the Gewiss 90 Restarter and we don't have one of those.Now that I've learned that such a device exists, we will be installing one as soon as possible, so thanks for raising the subject.Al
I don't have any experience in drying out a renovated house, but we do have a dehumidifier which we've learned to use all winter if we want to keep the mildew at bay without frequently opening windows and letting a lot of expensively heated air out of the house. If I had a place that was damp and going to be unoccupied for weeks on end, I'd be very concerned about what state the place would be in on our return.The dehumidifer we have is one of the little portable ones you see in appliance shops and DIY places. It's very effective and it has a control which you can adjust to set the desired degree of dryness. That, I'd imagine, should solve the problem of things drying out too fast.As far as the cost of running the dehumidifer is concerned, it's rated at only 235 Watts, so even if it ran constantly all day long, the power consumption over a week would be around 40 kilowatts. Whether the price of that much electricity is "too much" is a personal decision, but I'd be surprised if it's anywhere near as much as you use when you're living in the house.Al
We live in central Abruzzo (Teramo province, close to the Gran Sasso) and we receive most of the British Sky channels fine on a one-meter dish most of the time. The reception tends to pixelate or fail completely when there's rain and a heavy overcast, but normally the signal strength and quality bars are at or near 100%.Some channels, such as the BBC, you definitely will not be able to receive in Abruzzo without a huge dish since those transmitting antennas are tightly focused on the British Isles. We're also unable to receive some Sky channels, but I'm not sure if this is intentional or due to imperfections in the transmitting antennas. Nor do I know if we would get them if we had a bigger dish.I understand that the imperfections in the transmitter mean that in fringe reception areas - such as Italy - you can have a good signal in one place, but no signal at all a few kilometers down the road.I do agree with Iritalia when he suggests that your first step is to make absolutely certain your dish is aimed correctly.If your local satellite shop is unable or unwilling to assist, I'd suggest that it might be helpful to connect up a cheap, generic satellite box to see if you can get the non-Sky channels available on Astra. Those channels seem to not be focused on the UK very tightly, so they're helpful for positioning the dish.How you proceed if you still have problems once you're certain the dish is pointed at the Sky satellite is something I'm not too sure about.One thing I do know is that you very definitely do not want to ever call Sky to ask for help with your problems. Receiving their channels outside the UK is contrary to your agreement with them and they will disable your subscription card if they believe you are using it in continental Europe.Al
...but pretty much what I would have said if I had not had problems logging on this afternoon.In my opinion, Italian radio is just about as crap as Italian TV. What's more, there are about 50,000 different radio stations in Italy, each of which can only be received in an area with a radius of about 10 kilometres. However, since they all play the same pop crap, it doesn't really matter much that radio stations fade in and out every 5 minutes when you're on the Autostrada. Odds are good that the song that's fading out will also be playing on the next radio station you'll get on the same frequency.I have occasionally heard classical music on RAI 3, but even this national radio service comes and goes as you drive. There also seems to be an awful lot of talk programmes on RAI 3. My Italian is not good enough to understand what they're droning on about, but the general tone reminds me of BBC Radio 3 at its most pretentious and elitist.If you want to practice your idiomatic Italian comprehension, then listening to Italian radio is probably a good idea. If you just want to listen to some nice classical music while you drive, I think you're better off supplying your own.Al
I think Gregorio is right about good years and bad years. That's a very common pattern with fruit trees.Most of our fruit trees are not carrying much this year. The one notable exception, as mentioned earlier by Russ and Gromit, are the figs. But then the damn things grow like weeds here and every year produce heaps of fruit even though they're completely neglected without any fertilising or pruning. (Personally, my favoured technique for pruning fig trees involves a chainsaw and then a lawnmower regularly applied to the new shoots that pop up for years afterward.)We had a look at our olive grove yesterday and saw a fair amount of fruit on some trees and very little on others. Even the trees with the most fruit had nowhere near as much as they had last year.However, it seems to me that most of the fruit looks to be already a lot bigger than what we picked last year.Thinning of young fruit is a well-known technique for maximising the size of tree fruits, and I'm wondering if the weather this year might not have done something similar with the olives. Maybe we'll not get many olives, but they'll be so fat that the total volume won't be much less than last year. That's probably wishful thinking, but the trees around here are all doing very well in general, so it doesn't seem too ridiculous to suppose that there's a lot of energy in them needing to go somewhere.Having said that, it looks like most of that energy has gone into producing an awful lot of greenery on our trees and our neighbour's. We pruned our trees fairly hard last winter; now, someone unfamiliar with olives could be excused for thinking that they've been neglected for years. Our neighbours pruned their trees - which had been neglected for years - very hard last year; now, their trees are perfectly spherical from a distance and, up close, they're nothing but a solid mass of young growth.Al
On Badger's point about having to periodically heat water up in order to prevent bacterial growth (I suspect he's thinking of Legionella), that really only applies if the hot water is coming from a hot water tank as most Brits think of one.If you have a "Thermal Store" system (which is something solar pretty much requires), the hot water in the tank is static; once the tank is filled, is just sits there absorbing and giving off heat. Inside the tank, there is generally at least one input heat-transfer coil connected to the solar panel and one output heat-transfer coil connected to your cold water supply on one end and your hot water piping on the other. (Many Thermal Store tanks have more than one heat input coil so you can, for example, use your wood fire or pellet stove to heat the tank and so provide domestic hot water.)The volume of water in the heat transfer coil connected to the domestic hot water pipes is minimal, so saying you have to heat up the system regularly to prevent the growth of disease organisms is true only if this is also necessary to prevent bacterial growth in the pipes in any house.Many Brits seem to have problems getting their heads around the Thermal Store concept since it is sort of the reverse of how a British hot water tank works. They seem to think that the only way to use solar energy to heat domestic hot water is to connect the panels to a heat transfer coil suspended in the water tank and then have the water in the tank flowing out the taps.In fact, this would be a very silly approach in Italy because of the lack of cisterns in domestic water supplies here. If you wanted to use this method and take your hot water directly from the tank, it would have to be built very strongly to withstand the sometimes fearsome pressure of mains Italian water. Obviously, a strongly-built tank will cost a lot more than one which only has to deal with the pressures exerted by the static volume of water it holds.As far as the question of finding kit cheaper than Navitron's in Italy is concerned, I suspect you'd have difficulty doing so.There are lots of technical arguments for and against evacuated tube systems as opposed to flat plate collectors, but I really don't want to get into all that. I believe that the evactuated tube systems sold by Navitron are a sensible approach for Italy and their kit is good value and as good in quality as any you're likely to find here.Unfortunately, I can't cite personal experience of using a Navitron system in Italy, because ours is still -- over a year after it's delivery -- sitting in the barn waiting to be installed! There are various reasons for this, but difficulty in finding a competent plumber who seems to be someone I can work with has been a major factor. Installing a solar water system isn't rocket science and it's something I'd almost certainly do for myself if I lived in Britain, but I decided to hire a plumber to do the job here because of the lower cost of plumbers in Italy and the convenience of not having to faff around with planning in detail all the gubbins I'd need and then acquiring them from an Italian plumbing supply place. However, since it seems that every plumber around here is very busy over L'Aquila way (no doubt doing charity work), I'm beginning to wonder if the only way the job is going to get done is if I spend a lot of time sketching pipe runs, counting compression fittings and figuring out what the Italians call all the various bits and pieces I'll need!Al
Comments posted
According to the registration documents, our 2.5 litre diesel Navara is rated at 126 kilowatts, which is apparently 196 horsepower.That is indeed a bit more ooomph than that possessed by your typical Ford Focus. Tables on Parker's suggest it could be as much as twice the power (with, of course, the concomitant increases in fuel consumption and exhaust emissions).I have no idea why we're paying less that we would if we had a Fiat Panda diesel. The registration document is far from being as clear as it might be, but I can see nothing obvious on it indicating that the Navara is considered special in some way. But perhaps it is. I dimly recall hearing that they were considered good value in Britain at one point because they weren't considered "normal" cars when it came to calculating Road Tax. Suppose the same might apply here.Whatever the case, I really would not recommend that anyone get a vehicle the size of ours unless they had a definite, practical need for it. We have it because we live on a farm in an area which can get a lot of snow. I don't regret buying the Navara, but it is expensive to run and it can be a a bit hair-raising now and then when driving it around Italian cities.Al
We have a Nissan Navara 4WD pickup with a 2.5 litre diesel engine.Last year, Italian road tax was less than €65. The Agenzia delle Entrate calculator says we'll be paying the same next year.I just used the Parker's website Road Tax calculator and it said I'd be paying £405 Road Tax this year if the car was registered in the UK. Next year, the cost will be £435.Of course, if I was running the same car in Britain, I'd also be paying about £250 a year for insurance instead of €1,000 (an amount that seems fixed and never decreases, even though I've never had an accident in Italy).If you're on a budget, I suspect that the cost that may be the main determining factor in what sort of car you run is how much you will pay for insurance, not the Italian road tax, which is really just a token amount.Since it's marginally relevant, I repeat my favourite Italian road tax story. A year after I bought our car, I decided to renew the road tax, so I visited an ACI office to sort this out. It was only at this point that I learned that the car dealer had handed over an untaxed car and I'd been driving without tax for a year. The fine was something like €7 plus interest. That evening, while watching a UK TV channel on satellite, the DVLA advert showing a car being crushed because it was didn't have a valid tax disk was shown. That says something about the two countries, but I'll leave it to you to figure out what.Al
Bear in mind that, during the period when your grandparents entered the USA, it wasn't unusal for the names people used in the USA to be different to the names the immigrants had used in their countries of birth.Apparently it's an urban myth that names were frequently changed by Ellis Island immigration officials, but mistakes were made by shipping company officials before the immigrants boarded ship and it wasn't uncommon for immigrants to choose to change their names to something less obviously "foreign".This was probably more often the case with immigrants from Eastern European countries than for Italians but, given what Russ says above, are you certain beyond all doubt that the surname your grandparents used when they lived in Abruzzo was "Angelo" and not "D'Angelo"?Al
The devices being discussed here are for use in conjunction with an RCD (commonly called a salva vita in Italy). This isn't a normal circuit breaker that trips only if there's a major fault, but one so sensitive to an imbalance in the electrical current on the two wires of the supply that it will turn off the electricity so quickly that you won't feel anything if you should be daft enough to grab a live wire while standing barefoot in the shower.Unfortunately, this sensitivity also means that they seem to trip if there's an imbalance on the wires supplying electricity to a house, as will happen often in rural areas of Italy with its long stretches of electric lines running above ground, since these are subject to all sorts of electrical interference.So, no, they're not really an alternative to the normal salva vita, more an improvement on the normal sort.Unfortunately, I really doubt if one would do anything to sort out your problem with the ENEL meter circuit breaker tripping. If that happens to you regularly and the circuit breakers and RCD on your side of the meter never trip, I suspect you either have a faulty meter circuit breaker or - more likely - you're simply exceeding the current which your contract with ENEL allows you to draw.Al
We've often had problems with a RCD (aka "salva vita") tripping for reasons that seem to have nothing to do with electrical equipment in the house, most recently a couple of days ago when we had some fairly strong winds during the night.So I'm certain you're not the only one with the problem, but I didn't respond because you asked to hear about people's experiences with the Gewiss 90 Restarter and we don't have one of those.Now that I've learned that such a device exists, we will be installing one as soon as possible, so thanks for raising the subject.Al
I don't have any experience in drying out a renovated house, but we do have a dehumidifier which we've learned to use all winter if we want to keep the mildew at bay without frequently opening windows and letting a lot of expensively heated air out of the house. If I had a place that was damp and going to be unoccupied for weeks on end, I'd be very concerned about what state the place would be in on our return.The dehumidifer we have is one of the little portable ones you see in appliance shops and DIY places. It's very effective and it has a control which you can adjust to set the desired degree of dryness. That, I'd imagine, should solve the problem of things drying out too fast.As far as the cost of running the dehumidifer is concerned, it's rated at only 235 Watts, so even if it ran constantly all day long, the power consumption over a week would be around 40 kilowatts. Whether the price of that much electricity is "too much" is a personal decision, but I'd be surprised if it's anywhere near as much as you use when you're living in the house.Al
We live in central Abruzzo (Teramo province, close to the Gran Sasso) and we receive most of the British Sky channels fine on a one-meter dish most of the time. The reception tends to pixelate or fail completely when there's rain and a heavy overcast, but normally the signal strength and quality bars are at or near 100%.Some channels, such as the BBC, you definitely will not be able to receive in Abruzzo without a huge dish since those transmitting antennas are tightly focused on the British Isles. We're also unable to receive some Sky channels, but I'm not sure if this is intentional or due to imperfections in the transmitting antennas. Nor do I know if we would get them if we had a bigger dish.I understand that the imperfections in the transmitter mean that in fringe reception areas - such as Italy - you can have a good signal in one place, but no signal at all a few kilometers down the road.I do agree with Iritalia when he suggests that your first step is to make absolutely certain your dish is aimed correctly.If your local satellite shop is unable or unwilling to assist, I'd suggest that it might be helpful to connect up a cheap, generic satellite box to see if you can get the non-Sky channels available on Astra. Those channels seem to not be focused on the UK very tightly, so they're helpful for positioning the dish.How you proceed if you still have problems once you're certain the dish is pointed at the Sky satellite is something I'm not too sure about.One thing I do know is that you very definitely do not want to ever call Sky to ask for help with your problems. Receiving their channels outside the UK is contrary to your agreement with them and they will disable your subscription card if they believe you are using it in continental Europe.Al
...but pretty much what I would have said if I had not had problems logging on this afternoon.In my opinion, Italian radio is just about as crap as Italian TV. What's more, there are about 50,000 different radio stations in Italy, each of which can only be received in an area with a radius of about 10 kilometres. However, since they all play the same pop crap, it doesn't really matter much that radio stations fade in and out every 5 minutes when you're on the Autostrada. Odds are good that the song that's fading out will also be playing on the next radio station you'll get on the same frequency.I have occasionally heard classical music on RAI 3, but even this national radio service comes and goes as you drive. There also seems to be an awful lot of talk programmes on RAI 3. My Italian is not good enough to understand what they're droning on about, but the general tone reminds me of BBC Radio 3 at its most pretentious and elitist.If you want to practice your idiomatic Italian comprehension, then listening to Italian radio is probably a good idea. If you just want to listen to some nice classical music while you drive, I think you're better off supplying your own.Al
I think Gregorio is right about good years and bad years. That's a very common pattern with fruit trees.Most of our fruit trees are not carrying much this year. The one notable exception, as mentioned earlier by Russ and Gromit, are the figs. But then the damn things grow like weeds here and every year produce heaps of fruit even though they're completely neglected without any fertilising or pruning. (Personally, my favoured technique for pruning fig trees involves a chainsaw and then a lawnmower regularly applied to the new shoots that pop up for years afterward.)We had a look at our olive grove yesterday and saw a fair amount of fruit on some trees and very little on others. Even the trees with the most fruit had nowhere near as much as they had last year.However, it seems to me that most of the fruit looks to be already a lot bigger than what we picked last year.Thinning of young fruit is a well-known technique for maximising the size of tree fruits, and I'm wondering if the weather this year might not have done something similar with the olives. Maybe we'll not get many olives, but they'll be so fat that the total volume won't be much less than last year. That's probably wishful thinking, but the trees around here are all doing very well in general, so it doesn't seem too ridiculous to suppose that there's a lot of energy in them needing to go somewhere.Having said that, it looks like most of that energy has gone into producing an awful lot of greenery on our trees and our neighbour's. We pruned our trees fairly hard last winter; now, someone unfamiliar with olives could be excused for thinking that they've been neglected for years. Our neighbours pruned their trees - which had been neglected for years - very hard last year; now, their trees are perfectly spherical from a distance and, up close, they're nothing but a solid mass of young growth.Al
On Badger's point about having to periodically heat water up in order to prevent bacterial growth (I suspect he's thinking of Legionella), that really only applies if the hot water is coming from a hot water tank as most Brits think of one.If you have a "Thermal Store" system (which is something solar pretty much requires), the hot water in the tank is static; once the tank is filled, is just sits there absorbing and giving off heat. Inside the tank, there is generally at least one input heat-transfer coil connected to the solar panel and one output heat-transfer coil connected to your cold water supply on one end and your hot water piping on the other. (Many Thermal Store tanks have more than one heat input coil so you can, for example, use your wood fire or pellet stove to heat the tank and so provide domestic hot water.)The volume of water in the heat transfer coil connected to the domestic hot water pipes is minimal, so saying you have to heat up the system regularly to prevent the growth of disease organisms is true only if this is also necessary to prevent bacterial growth in the pipes in any house.Many Brits seem to have problems getting their heads around the Thermal Store concept since it is sort of the reverse of how a British hot water tank works. They seem to think that the only way to use solar energy to heat domestic hot water is to connect the panels to a heat transfer coil suspended in the water tank and then have the water in the tank flowing out the taps.In fact, this would be a very silly approach in Italy because of the lack of cisterns in domestic water supplies here. If you wanted to use this method and take your hot water directly from the tank, it would have to be built very strongly to withstand the sometimes fearsome pressure of mains Italian water. Obviously, a strongly-built tank will cost a lot more than one which only has to deal with the pressures exerted by the static volume of water it holds.As far as the question of finding kit cheaper than Navitron's in Italy is concerned, I suspect you'd have difficulty doing so.There are lots of technical arguments for and against evacuated tube systems as opposed to flat plate collectors, but I really don't want to get into all that. I believe that the evactuated tube systems sold by Navitron are a sensible approach for Italy and their kit is good value and as good in quality as any you're likely to find here.Unfortunately, I can't cite personal experience of using a Navitron system in Italy, because ours is still -- over a year after it's delivery -- sitting in the barn waiting to be installed! There are various reasons for this, but difficulty in finding a competent plumber who seems to be someone I can work with has been a major factor. Installing a solar water system isn't rocket science and it's something I'd almost certainly do for myself if I lived in Britain, but I decided to hire a plumber to do the job here because of the lower cost of plumbers in Italy and the convenience of not having to faff around with planning in detail all the gubbins I'd need and then acquiring them from an Italian plumbing supply place. However, since it seems that every plumber around here is very busy over L'Aquila way (no doubt doing charity work), I'm beginning to wonder if the only way the job is going to get done is if I spend a lot of time sketching pipe runs, counting compression fittings and figuring out what the Italians call all the various bits and pieces I'll need!Al