Another day of utter frustration

You could not make this up. After weeks of waiting, the technician from Enedis arrived today as scheduled. I thought that he was only coming to see what had to be done but in fact he told me that he was here to connect my house to mains electricity. What a result!

But not so fast, this is France. He checked outside and then came into the house and after he’d checked the system over he said that he was unable to do the connection because the electrician had failed to connect the incoming mains cables to the house’s main switch. He said that if the electrician could come and do it he’d have the house connected in a trice but that, of course, was a forlorn hope.

I phoned Didier, the builder’s clerk of works, who tried to contact the electrician who, unsurprisingly, wasn’t taking any calls, so the technician explained the situation to Didier and left. I was fuming.

Later on shortly after I’d begun masking up the kitchen ready for painting, tomorrow if all goes well, Didier arrived out of the blue with the electrician on his phone. He went into the utility room and as instructed by the electrician pulled the two wires out that had been stuffed unconnected into the back of the cabinet. It took him ten minutes to connect them but it was too late.

I’ll now have to go through the whole rigmarole of making another appointment with Enedis for them to come back again and do the connection. How long will that take? Who knows. Two weeks? More? How could the electrician have been so thoughtless and stupid to have left the system in such a state.

It is not Enedis’s job to connect the incoming cables to the system. They expect the system to have been checked by the Consuel, as it was on 31st March and ready to be connected outside. Imagine if there was a system fault, they did the connection inside and the house caught fire. It was utter madness for the electrician to try to lay the blame on someone else, as he did.

It was not a complete disaster, however, because it appears that a ‘live’ Linky smart meter provides a minimal emergency power, how I do not know. But with the electrician still on his phone, Didier cut off the seal that Enedis expressly says must not be removed except by them and began to switch circuits on in the house. It turned out that all the lights except those in the lounge worked and we surmised that the ones in the lounge didn’t because 12 spots draw in excess of the emergency supply power.

All of the power points that I checked also worked, as well as the cooker and hot plate and also the house’s ventilation system mounted in the roof. I just connected one spot in each bedroom and the utility room to make sure that their lights worked but the lights in the dining area, corridor and bathroom which are all fully installed all worked perfectly.

I’ll contact Enedis again tomorrow but I won’t be holding my breath about getting an early date for the connection to be done. In the meantime I’ll go ahead with painting the kitchen tomorrow so I can get its lights up and then I might think about making some tentative arrangements to move in anyway as I’ve now got an inflatable double bed in bedroom one and with a working kitchen and bathroom it’d probably be more comfortable in the house than in the caravan.