Life in Galicia

Winter is the time when one realises that electricity consumption goes up. Here in rural Galicia power is invoiced monthly and every two or three month they come round to read the meter.

So often the first invoice in January or so comes as a little surprise, even more so this year as the increase in pricing last year, just before deregulation, shows its ugly face.

Yes, the electricity market in Spain is deregulated although one is hard pressed to notice this here.

You can freely switch your provider, but all of them fall back on the government set maximum price.

Jan/2011  0.165 Kw/h incl. VAT

Click this for more information on electricity pricing. Search for electricidad.

The high humidity in winter requires the dryer to run frequently, the central heating and pump is running and yes one uses a bit more light.

The supply grid is not as bad as seen on the right, but also not far off. Frequent fluctuations, brown out and actual cut offs are common.

Over the last two nights its become so bad here that my wife took candles to bed to read, as the flickering induced headaches.

If this doesn’t improve I maybe forced to install a UPS (uninterruptible power supply) to smooth this out as it is not healthy for the electric appliances like fridges, freezers etc.

On the issue of light bulbs and energy saving. Well even here the tidal wave of CFL’s (compact fluorescent light bulb) is in full swing.

Like these they tend to look the same but far from it. It is worth trialing some to see which ones are for you. Some are immediately on and “warm up” after a while, others you wait forever to see the step you know is there.

If you are interested here is a comparison of American CFL’s

The important two information’s are the actual light output in either Lux or Lumen again to confuse as there is no direct conversion between these two. Lumen is “candle power or light” that is produced, whereas Lux is the light received on a surface of 1 m².

You find more about this here at wikipedia

Now the other important factor is the “color” of light or more precisely the temperature of light which is measured in Kelvin as well as the spectrum or more precise the CRI (color rendering index). (more on wiki here)

You may have noticed a difference in “warm white” label and the actual result. No wonder as warm white is subjective even at the manufacturer. On the latest CFL you should find the actual color temperature given in K e.g. 2500 for warm white. CFL’s also do not have a CRI of 100 which would be the old fashioned filament bulb but the closer they get the better. 85 – 89 is now achievable. In future we should see a 3 digit code. 1.st is the CRI so a CRI of 89 would be 9 and the next two are the temperature e.g. 2700K = 27.
927 would be CRI 85 – 94 and 2700 K.

CFL’s as standard are not dimmable due to their electronic ballast, but there are now dimmable ones available as well, just on low settings they tend to be a bit bluer than the good old bulb.
2 – 100% dimmable are achievable but not yet common, check the %. 20-60% means at 60% it turns on full and below 20% off.

Closing comments:

Energy saving = Yes Cost saving=No Full dimmable full spectrum 11W  (equiv 60W) = 14£
8000h life span = 35 Kw/h saving = 4.09£ at current energy price including IVA.

Mercury – Just watch this CFL The Truth

So long and happy hunting for the ideal CFL

Expat

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This entry was posted on Friday, February 5th, 2010 at 3:06 pm and is filed under Financial, Observations, Progress. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.