Our home in Western Head has taught us one thing: oil heat is something that has to go. In less than three months we’ve filled up twice, at a cost of roughly $1000 each time.
It’s amazing how in North America energy is just burned up with little thought, and with no real effort to change things beyond complaining about the bill at the end of the month.
Then we arrived back in our apartment in Alencon, France, and wondered why we seemed to have no hot water late in the evening.
It’s because the entire French electrical system is designed that way!
In a nutshell, electricity in France is provided by EDF, and EDF operates according to rules established by the government of France. One of the big rules is ”conserve energy.”
Most homes in France have Linky box like this:
The computers at EDF connect with the computers in the Linky box, which connect to the GM1-M22 breaker in our switch box in the apartment.
As explained to me on Facebook:
The hot water cylinder is controlled by a signal from the electric meter that turns it on at night at the lower rate. this is a via a relay ..which also allows you to override it to run during the day. so you have three positions on off and auto. there are two breakers... one for the signal circuit (Normally 2 amp but you have a 10 amp breaker) and one for the heating circuit.
and
The navy and white 20 amp fuse controls when the water gets heated. Basically there are 3 options, on, off and auto (automatically on during cheap rate electricity). Our boiler is set to Auto and only comes on during heures creuses (cheap rate electricity hours). Your bill will detail when/if you have cheap rate- ours is midnight to 7am. You can over-ride the switch and put to permanent if you arrive at the appartment and the electricity has been switched off and you have no hot water but it resets to automatic the following night when it gets the heures creuses “off” pulse from the incoming electricity supply. Lots of French houses have this type of set up. If you have a really big water tank, it is likely that your water will be warm in the morning but that it will take two nights to get really, really hot
In other words, for the benefit of everyone, you plan your hot water usage to match the demands of the system, saving electricity, and reducing the demands on the overall power grid.
The point being, and this seems to be largely missing in North America, we’re all in this together, and if we all work together we can greatly improve how we use energy.
It is remarkable how quickly you can shift your mindset from “what I want, and want right now” to “I can adjust my needs to fit within what benefits all of us.”
And of course it’s remarkable how easy these things are if your government is prepared to demonstrate real leadership and say “because it is important for all of us” instead of just making vague promises without any real action to make them real.
In Canada everyone in government talks about how we need to save energy. In France they go a step further and make it the mandated default to heat hot water during the heures creuses, and to aggressively underwrite the costs of insulating and updating homes, especially for those people with low incomes.