Life in Galicia
Galicia life and experiences as seen from Mer near Sober

Electrics

Sparkies corner

Pump failure – No shower today – ….

Well, sometimes things happen at the right time. Like this Sunday our central pump decided to fail gradually. Tripping the RCD more and more often. We managed a shower each in the evening resetting the switch every so often.

I phoned Pablo, our electrista y fontaneiro, who promptly came round this afternoon. A quick check by him and he confirmed “el bomba es stropeado (kaputt)”. As we have a fairly powerful submerged pump it took the two of us to haul it out.

The good news is the pump has two years warranty and he himself only put it in about 15 month ago. The bad news is it may take two weeks to get it replaced / repaired.

Pablo being Pablo immediately offered to put in a smaller “emergency” pump to tie us over as this well is our only source of water.

well and bucketSo until tomorrow, no showers and back to the good old bucket and string method of fetching water.

At least no friends and visitors are around should we start to smell…….

 

Expat

 

 

It helps to buy a telefone line with a house attached

I’ve read  a a lot about problems with Telefonica and telephones not to speak Internet in Spain.

Maybe I’m lucky or maybe this is Galicia or it may have helped that we bought a telephone line with an actual house attached.

I asked the agent to help us get a connection and that I would like ADSL as well.

She wasn’t to sure. A quick check on Telefonicas system (when you eventually find the page / disponibilidad) revealed that although the hamlet I’m moving to only has 8 inhabitants one can have ADSL!

So I started by ordering a telephone line over the Internet.

I received a call in the UK from a fellow who spoke very clear Spanish and although my vocabulary was not yet up to anything useful beyond ordering food it expired that the line would be installed.

When we arrived we found a new working phone.

A day later a very nice guy from Telefonica showed up and gave me a standard router “GRATIS” and said it’s all connected. If I need any changes he gave me his number so I can either use Telefonica or a more direct way.

Woaa, I plugged the router in. Loaded the CD. Installed a bit of software. Plugged my Laptop in and bingo the Internet was there.

I had a Dlink G604 wireless router and some Diverse DECT BT / Siemens phones in the car.

So after rigging the connection e.g. splicing the cable red/green to red/white the DECT phones worked. Which is great as the phone point is in a room not yet heated.

The DLink even when loading Spanish firmware refused to connect to ADSL so I simply plugged the Telefonica router into the DLink moved the Dlink to 192.168.2.1 and told my Laptops to go to 192.168.1.1 for whatever they desire. I had no more problems.

The connection is a wee bit shaky but starting to bed in and I now don’t have to restart the Telefonica router when the ADSL fails (about twice a day) it has now learned that I’m persistent so it does it itself.

So buying a telephone line with a suitable house attached seems to have paid off.

Expat

Update 2009/04 – I now have 6Mb allowing me download speeds of up to 1Mb/s and streaming media.