We’ve had issues with the electricty tripping since we bought the house. We had similar issues when staying in Martin’s parents place in Benabbio way back when, so we just assumed it went with the territory.
Things got worse in the autumn as we bought a bunch of electric heaters to warm the house up. As the walls are solid, they act as a heat sink and it takes a long time to get the house up to a comfortable temperature. With heaters on, the leccy was tripping regularly.
When Fenella got here this spring, the situation was even worse and she was on her own. She battled on until Martin arrived and then, with some investigation, we came to the conclusion that the main culprit was the old (and tiny) washing machine rather than the wiring. So when we took Fenella’s hire car back to Pisa on Wednesday, we went to Comet and picked out a decent size washing machine and dryer and arranged delivery for Friday afternoon.
Martin remembered reading something online about how a limit on the total power is applied to Italian electric accounts and how the limit could potentially be raised. He went onto the Enel website and sure enough, there was a facility to find out your limit (ours was 4.5kW) and to request an increase. It looked as though it would take a week or more to implement the request, so we decided to wait until after the electrician had been to inspect the wiring (scheduled for the next day).
On Thursday, Gino turned up to take measurements of the house and brought along the electrician who assessed the wiring with a view to preparing a quote for adding sockets and potentially rewiring all or part of the house. He agreed that the washing machine was the likely cause of our problems. He also recommended increasing the power to 6kW (apparently the maximum unless you upgrade to three phase).
On Friday evening, the washer and dryer eventually arrived at about 9pm. The delivery guys installed them in the current laundry dungeon and took away the old washing machine. We were able to do laundry again and doing so did not constantly trip the electricity!
The same day Martin went online to order the electricity power upgrade. Within half an hour it was done (presumably by smart meter).
We are still getting the odd trip, but this is generally on a single circuit when we overload it with too many heaters – rather than the main trip that was giving us so much jip before. Hallelujah!