Wednesday July 20, 2022
Electricity usage is a thing Margaret and I try to minimize here in Italy after a couple of times of exceeding the 3KW limit and popping the house breaker. We stopped using an immersion hot water kettle as it uses 2.2KW. We cleaned the air conditioning filters to minimize load. And that brings us to hot water heaters, the dishwasher and the clothes washer. There are two small electric hot water tanks, one in the first floor kitchen that supplies the kitchen sink and the adjacent bathroom, the second one in the upstairs bathroom. After a lifetime of using American dishwashers and clothes washers with 40- or 50-gallon gas hot water tanks we adapted to using the smaller electric ones by trying to provide hot water only when the appliances needed it. Recently I made a comment to our neighbor Paul about this and I got one of those “only Americans” looks. He mentioned that European clothes and dishwashers use an internal flash heater to supply what each device needs and neither one actually uses hot water from the hot water tanks. Sure enough, the clothes washer only has a single incoming cold water line. I can’t see the hookup for the dishwasher but we ran a cycle with a cold hot water tank and still got steam when the dishwasher finished. Live and learn. Our hot water tanks will get a lot less use now.
We finally made it to the beach. We kept getting asked how we liked the beach and the sea and we kept having to admit that we had not made time to go relax in the sand and water. Our neighbor Justina still works in the UK and is back with her husband Paul for a longish vacation and she has been forcing him to take a break from remodeling their home and get to the beach. She reached out to us to go with them yesterday afternoon and we spent 6 relaxing hours at San Salvo beach. The water was warm and shallow and very salty. We had pizza there and walked the promenade when it got dark. A thoroughly pleasant outing. We are now well equipped to go back ourselves, a foil lined beach umbrella with screw in sand anchor and beach towels.
Our next hurdle is accepting that the noon nap needs to happen to get us on Italian time. We keep powering through instead of just setting time aside.
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