Electricity Portuguese style

If you’ve ever spent any time in Portugal you’ve probably noticed the rather Gypsy-like way the electricity seems to work here. One appliance too many in most households, and down goes your electricity. Same thing in cafes it seems, no one is too perturbed when the lights go off in the local tasca for no apparent reason. Not that its the end of the world, just gotta turn something off, then wander over to your electricity box and turn it back on.

Now I’m no electrician, but apparently this is really the way it’s meant to work here, this is not dodgy wiring, rats in your walls or something, this is simply a case of ‘thats way to much power guvnor, shut it dahn!’. I’ve spent some time living in UK and Finland and as far as I can remember you don’t need to specify the amount of volt-amperes or any crap like that when you sign up for an electricity contact… there might be some basic monthly fees but on top of that you just pay for all the juice you use in KWh. If you want you can stick every appliance on in your home and given your circuits can take it there shouldn’t be a problem.

But here you have to choose the ‘potency’ of your contract in kVA, and of course everyone tries to get away with the cheapest one possible which is 3.5 kVA. This is the one that our rental flat came with and is so sucky that just having the dishwasher and a hairdryer on at the same time kills the power. Shit, I didn’t even know what a volt-ampere (VA) was before this, its amazing how they can make the service so complicated! So basically you have to try and work out how much power you are going to draw, and choose your ‘potency’ accordingly, its sort of like a bloody phone contract or something. Problem is if you choose too low a potency your electricity will be going off every other day, and too high and just the monthly fee alone will be like 30 euros (that’s before they even add the charge for the electricity you use). Pretty damn sucky I must say, maybe there is some good reason for this, but don’t have a fucking clue what this could be….

The EDP slogan is ‘Feel our Energy’. Yeh right, feel my balls more like.