It’s started

After a certain amount of everyone, including the mayor, standing around talking, which seems ‘de rigueur’ in France, engines were started earlier this morning and work began on connecting me up to electricity. It didn’t take long before the chap operating the ‘mini pelle’ (small excavator) had uncovered the empty plastic tube (‘gaine’) that was buried a few years ago and runs up from the corner of my land to the ‘coffre’ (electric box) 80 or 90 metres away on the other side of the road.

They have a ‘cable snake’, a long stiffish cable on a spool, which presumably they intend to shove up the ‘gaine’ until it emerges at the other end and which they’ll then withdraw with a strong cord attached to it (I saw this happening when they were laying cables in the ground at my old house just before I moved). They’ll then attach the cord to the electrical cable and pull that through until it is inside the ‘gaine’ and sticking out at both ends, ready to be connected at the ‘coffre’ on the other side of the road and a new ‘coffre’ that will be the source of supply on my land.

I don’t think that I’ll be getting connected up today – I think that all they’ll do is get the cable in place, although I’m not sure – but at least everything is now getting underway and it must surely happen quite soon. Mustn’t it?

FOOTNOTE

It’s just after 4.00 pm as I type this and the small team has now finished, cleared away and left for the day. As I expected, they’ve only extended the main supply cable down to my land and put a box (‘coffre principal’) into place ready for either Enedis or a contractor to come along and actually make the necessary connections to make it live. Here are the results of their handiwork.

So although it’s a big advance, the project is far from finished. The big question now is, ‘When will my connection actually be made?’ This is an imponderable. It’s not unusual to see boxes like this standing untouched for many weeks – the new boxes that were put in outside my old house that I left at the end of June still haven’t been connected up. I guess that I’ll just have to wait patiently for a bit longer to find out 😐