IT'S JUST ELECTRIC!
/As you can imagine every room in the house has been disturbed by the rewiring, I should have and did expected some disruption but I don't think that I was prepared for the total onslaught of wires that have now flooded the house. Thank goodness that we decided to move into the gite, it is a corner of organised chaos and a place of comfort...... well until last night.
As dusk began to fall I headed to the kitchen to pop a casserole in the oven. The cooker had been carefully cleaned and tested as part of the move in tasks, so I confidently switched it on. The electric heater blew warm air into the room and all seemed cozy and comfortable for our Friday evening. Then the power went, probably because I had too much on, these three phase supplies can be a bit temperamental until they are correctly balanced. We headed out to find the main switch in the piggery to reset the system. Now the switch was old, very old, it was a press button sort and it had been a bit sticky when we first bought the house, if truth be told, we'd been advised to get changed. However the next time we had needed to put it on, it had worked. We've not been using the gite so the problem had not reared it's head....... until tonight. So there we were in rural France with two power supplies ( one for the main house and one for the gite) and neither of them worked!
We found the details of EDF English speaking service and set off in the waining light to the main house. With torches in hand we fought our way over a spaghetti of wires to our landline telephone. At last a very helpful operator gave us a number to ring, with no pen or paper, this house had been cleared remember, we had to write down the details in the dust that had settled on a table in the salon. The chiseling of conduits creates an enormous amount of grime, I'd hate you to think it was a lack of cleaning on my part!
The next phase was tricky, it was to phone another number, not an English speaking service, to report the fault. It is at these times that one promises to try harder at learning French. After a while of waiting and tapping in a series of numbers, given to us by the first operator, we were able to speak to someone who logged our fault and actioned an engineer.
Just after 8pm and a couple of hours after our mayday call, an engineer arrived and duly changed the switch, Voila, we had light. Thank you to EDF for their quick response and for restoring our Friday evening.
It's electric! / A late November rose flowering in the garden, something to cheer the picture up.