batteries: Redundant forklift truck / milk float

Automotive and "leisure batteries" are not that good for deep discgcharge. How about redundant forklift truck / milk float batteries (yeh, all right, maybe not in a milk float in Spain, but you get the idea.) The crumbling Spanish economy may throw up the odd liquidated factory asset.

Petrol / Diesel gennys also have an advantage: Lots of waste heat. Up a calorifier and store the hot water.

+ 1 about a clever inverter to do load topping on the mains.

ooooo a holiday home in the woods! Who needs anything more than the light, a fridge (to store the holiday food), a place too keep the ale at the correct temperature, a log fire, and a place to roleplay into the early hours of the morning.

At a push a power socket to slow charge the laptops/tablets/phones during the day / when we're asleep. Anything else is a bonus.

lister

My friend just bought a Lister diesel engine (4KW?) for £150 and a 240V, 3KW generator for £50 on ebay.

You can run the engine on old vegetable oil.

Luxery!

I manage on 300w total. If you want more power I would recommend you get a victron quattro inverter and some batteries, you should be able to draw upto 10kva then.

Forget the microwave

Just use gas to do all the cooking, although I'd stick with an electric kettle because I can't wait 20 minutes to get a cup of tea.

As for lighting, what about gravity power -

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/12/12/deciwatt_gravity_light/

It's a con

As Iberdrola are offering to increase the capacity in exchange for certain monetary inducements and moving the meter etc.etc., is this not just a con to take more money from you and get you to do a load of work for them? Also, as Spain has a smart metering programme (albeit delayed like everyone elses), why does the meter need to be outside? Does it matter where it is? Me thinks this isn't so much to do with network capacity, but more about economics.

Welcome to the world of the future..

..where smart grids will only allow you to make coffee and cook, when its blowing a gale outside.

And extended winter cold will result in no significant renewable energy being generated, so your boiler won't work either.

1.5kw?

Easy, the only appliance I would struggle with would be the tumble drier. That being said im guessing you arent living with 3 kids so can happily "air dry". You have a gas cooker, so cook on the cooker. Microwaves arent needed and neither are kettles. Two small pans of water will boil quite quickly.

Our 37" sharp TV pulls just under 1A when running. My gaming pc pulls 2A. The washing machine is the biggest draw I can imagine. Our LG draws 6A at peak use (40 wash with warm fill) which wont leave you any headroom. That being said, just run the washing machine overnight or during the day. All these have been taken using OWLs. Tumble drier was 8A but I suspect that was a surge as the graph didnt show 8A continuous. Lights should be each. CFLs all round should be no more than 1A

What happens if you draw more than 6A then? Does it simply brown out or does it melt?

Pay the money, or find an alternative, rather than struggle along with something that's unsatisfactory.

I would be equally happy, in the same situation, to stump up for an external box and installation to it to the local sparky (who, buy him a beer, and he'll do it a lot cheaper than the usual tourist-idiot-quote). If you're worried about aesthetics, buy a load of stone of the same type and build an outhouse for it that blends in.

Or, similarly, to just tell the electrical company "No thanks, then" and cut off the supply entirely. I'd probably then ring round their competitors and see who could hook me back up with a decent amount of power. Failing some corporate back-pedalling, I'd then just buy a couple of solar panels or a genny and go off-grid. Seriously, if you're paying every month to be struggling with only 1.5KW, you might as well do it on your own terms and without reliance on someone else. 1.5KW is not a lot of instantaneous power to generate and you won't be doing it 24/7 (hell, I bet any modern house only pulls that when you have tools or appliances or heaters turned on, and you don't have something on for 24 hours a day except possibly lighting and background electronics like clocks, alarms, TV etc.) - hell, if you're living there permanently you don't want the hassle of the power problem and if you're living there sporadically (e.g. holiday home) you win big time by just doing it yourself.

Honestly, if it was that prohibitive, I'd find an alternative and not suffer it even as a fallback (why, if they provide such pathetic service?). If it's not that prohibitive, then you should just pay it. It's not like the £10,000 that some ADSL ISP's want to charge some people because they are 20km from the nearest town and they have no cables that way - there's a reason there that costs, and if they seriously are charging too much, why would you faff about with a dial-up that cuts out every hour when you could just go with a satellite or wireless provider?

Honestly, I think you're being a cheapskate and then whinging because of it. And if you're not a cheapskate, shell out the not-a-fortune on your own power independence and solve the problem once and for all.

Definitely scrap the kettle

Definitely scrap the electric kettle and get one for the gas hob. You'll find it cheaper as gas is about one third the price of electricity per kWh. I've done that in the UK (even with my 100A supply).

May I politely suggest making popcorn the old fashioned way? Might make movie time a little easier and it should be cheaper.

for those suggesting the re-use of UPS systems watch out if you are using to go between on and off grid.

I use several smaller UPS systems here to keep systems running during the frequent power cuts (joys of overhead power lines in the middle of nowhere)

the ups systems handle the loss of grid fine, they also quite happily accept the diesel generator starting up and switching in to replace the grid even though the mains frequency is all over the place as loads change.

what they don't handle very well is switching back from generator to grid, 1 time in three they will shut down.

the sequence is this...

generator off (ups systems kick back in)

10 second delay

grid on (ups systems shut down, lots of beeping and flashing lights and no power to the systems the ups was meant to keep running)

I can only assume that they don't like the supply coming back on completely out of phase

Spanish practices

> stumping a huge wad for some electrician to sign a piece of paper

But that's what the whole spanish (black) economy runs on. When we got our casa a few years back, Endesa (the local power company) told us that the mere act of buying the house required an outside meter box to be installed - there being only a sticky-out box on the outside wall and the "new" regulations required this to be flush with the wall. Oh, and we had to get a boletin, too.

In practice, the Boletin meant that "an amigo of an amigo" popped round, slapped a steel box into the hole I'd prepared, yeso'd it in place (all spanish houses are held together with yeso: a sort of industrial strength plaster) cast a furtive eyeball over with wiring, stamped his stamp and charged €350 for the half-hour job. Another visit to the Endesa office, clutching said Boletin, resulted a day or two later in a man in a van arriving with the shiny new meter that was duly installed in the box and the classic phrase: Let there be light came true. Luckily in our part of Spain, the "potencia" comes in 3.3kW (15 Amps), 4.4kW (20A) or 5.5kW steps - though actually getting the 220 Volts needed to drive these levels is often a hit and miss affair. 180 -190 Volts being closer to the norm.

The only sensible way to think of the process, isn't to scowl at the inefficiency of the system, or the cost of the paltry amount of work, or the illogical regulations. You just have to take a deep breath, smile sweetly, hand over the cash and consider the whole thing philosophically as the hoops you have to jump through if you want electricity.

Replacement for "bypass breaker"?

Here in the 120 volt world (actually 240 volts with a center tap), the recommended method of bypass was to use pennies (nicely made from copper until they added some zinc) in the bottom of Edison based fuses. Worked wonders for additional current carrying capacity.

As for 1.5 kW (12.5 amps at our specified 120 volt level), it seems that ON AVERAGE that is what my house currently consumes. At least that is what the local power company (PG&E) tells us. Unfortunately that is not the peak demand. Sometimes the wife likes to have the shower room a little warmer after a chilling (45F) night and turns on the small space heater that in addition to only taking the chill off, does dim the lights while it runs. I suspect that it is around 1kW all by itself. Thankfully the house uses utility provided methane (again PG&E) to heat and cook. The main furnace does have a blower motor which is around 1HP or so (750 watts) but I haven't measured it.

And so it goes for us people around 37.5 degrees north latitude, which is near to what it is in Spain.

1.5kw??

Might I say, yikes? My desktop alone - a great beast of a machine built back when I had time to indulge in high end PC games - takes 1200w. And yes, it actually does use it all (I upgraded from a 1000w power supply at some point because it wasn't giving me enough juice). Add in the monitor and the printer and I probably pull more than 1.5kw just sitting down at my desk.

I'm surprised

while many comments have been helpful advice about how to get more power, few if any have congratulated the man on living frugally. Given that energy costs money, this is an example of living within his means (or more accurately his capacity) and one that others could emulate.

I'm not saying I fancy the idea of going without abundant electricity, but a week or two on limited kW through physical rather than monetary constraint might be a way for people to grasp what it means to live in the modern world. Might be a bit fun too.

Pity you're not in France

EDF has finally started installing huge solar arrays and shiny new connection box free for all and sundry as long as you sign up to giving them the power for say twenty years. I would have thought that the Spanish companies would have started something similar as they have even more incentive to change both generation and usage: electricity is still heavily subsidised and struggles to meet the rising peak demands in summer. Nice way of boosting rural economies with all the manual labour involved.