This is going to be a little bit of a Christmas-time saga and you’ll need a little backstory, so bear with me.
Firstly, you should know how apartment numbers normally work in Portugal. Unlike in the U.S., where your apartment letter might be arbitrary, the letter you here get usually corresponds to the direction you’re facing as you come up the stairs, or, for example, if you were trying to deliver a package. If you come up the first flight of stairs, and your apartment is on the right side, your apartment number will normally be 1D (or 1DT/1DTO, etc) for the Portuguese word for “right” (direita). If your apartment is on the left, your apartment number would normally be 1E (or 1ESQ) for the Portuguese word for “left” (esquerda). If you are straight ahead, you’d normally be 1F, for “front” (frente). Easy, right? The exceptions are where you really get screwed up.
When we bought our apartment, we noticed that although our unit is on the right, it’s marked 1E. Our real estate agent thought it was weird too, but she said she’d seen it a few times before, though it’s unusual. We joked about how that seems like it would be the gift that keeps on giving, trying to get things delivered, getting services installed, etc.
Ha ha ha. Turns out this is hilarious. (It is not.)
Overall, we haven’t had a problem with deliveries, since you have to be home to accept them anyway. (Lisbon is a capitol city, so they can’t just leave packages on your porch. There is no porch, only public sidewalk, and your package would obviously be stolen very quickly.) As soon we buzz the person in and hear them coming up the stairs, we open the apartment door and say olá, so they know where they’re going.
We had a rocky start with this apartment when we moved in, with the water hookup not being turned on, the AVAC (HVAC in the U.S.) wasn’t working, the microwave door wouldn’t open, and so on. It took months to get all of that sorted out (not uncommon in Portugal) – so long in fact that when we put the request in for the AVAC repair, we were hoping for the air conditioner to work, and by the time they got it fixed, we were grateful to have the heater working. But hey, it all finally got done. We were thrilled!
The day before Christmas Eve, the power abruptly shut off. Nothing in the apartment’s breaker panel was tripped, so we reached out to the amazing folks at Portugal Pros (the real estate agency that helped us get the place) and asked if maybe we were missing something. They told us to check the master breaker panel in the apartment lobby. We did, and sure enough, there was one glaring red light in a sea of green, and that red light was our apartment number. We held down the green button for two seconds, and the power came back on. Great! Then it went out again. Reset again, back on, then out again a minute or so later. WTF was going on? It would keep coming back on, but would cut out again right after.
Now, Brady and I are master troubleshooters. I’m better than he is. He disagrees, of course, but I’m the one writing the article, so he can suck it. My step-dad was an electrician and I grew up working in his shop, and Brady apprenticed as an electrician for a summer, so while we’re not super-genius at this stuff, we know how to troubleshoot problems.
We systematically started turning breakers off, triggering the outages, and we thought we had the pattern down. We got the power to stay up for several hours and then boom. Blackout again.
At this point, I mentioned to our real estate agent (who has been wonderful with follow-up) that I wondered if it wasn’t the 1E vs 1D thing, the gift we knew would keep giving. WHY wasn’t it tripping at the apartment breaker panel? Why was it tripping at the provider master panel? We chalked it up to shoddy workmanship or a faulty panel, but the thought still stirred in the back of our mind.
In Portugal, at least with our provider (MEO Energia), you can specify which kilowatt plan you want, a lower one or a higher one. We live and work from home, so we’d obviously want the higher limit.
We confirmed with MEO that our account was set to the higher kw limit, but it still felt weird that this was failing at the master panel, like we were being throttled. But but but they confirmed we weren’t. Still, the 1E vs 1D thing scratched at the back of our brains.
We were also panicking a little. We’re on-call over the break. Not having internet, the ability to recharge devices, etc was going to be a real problem. Not to mention not being able to shower, and no hot water in the middle of winter makes for a frosty bidet. Bracing!
More hours and hours of troubleshooting and we finally did nail the pattern.
We unplugged any unpredictable appliances that might have a cycle we couldn’t control, like the counter top ice maker, since that was a wild card we couldn’t trigger. Turns out, if any one of these things was turned on, power would go out:
- hot water heater
- cooktop
- oven
- electric kettle
- electric heating
Facing a chilly Christmas with no way to bathe or actually cook anything, we systematically went through all of our theories – a short somewhere in an outlet, a broken breaker panel, etc – and proved them all invalid. We unplugged the kettle from the kitchen and tried it in a room we knew was not on the same circuit and the power still went out. We also knew that if a repair needed to be made, there was no way it was going to happen before the new year, and definitely not before Christmas.
This definitely felt like a provider-level thing, like we were being throttled – but we had confirmed that our kw level was the higher one, and why would this just start now?? Back to our theories:
We have never met the folks in 1D. In fact, we’ve never seen (or heard) them, so we suspect they only live here part-time, if at all. What if they got their MEO bill and it was bonkers-high relative to an apartment no one is staying in, and what if, because of the 1E v 1D confusion, they asked to have their apartment kw throttled to keep costs lower, having no idea how their bill could possibly be that high when they’re not even living there, but it was actually ours that got throttled instead?
Today, the day after Christmas, I sent a note to our real estate people (this after-care stuff is NOT part of their job btw – they’re just amazing) with all of our findings, and this last theory. They asked us to check the serial numbers on the master panel downstairs and compare it to the one on our fatura (bill), and sure enough, they DO NOT MATCH. The serial number for 1D does match. Smoking gun.
I feel stupid for not even noticing that there was a serial number on the bill in the first place, but I think sometimes when you’re hit with a wall of text in a foreign language, along with a bunch of numbers you don’t know you’re supposed to care about, you only look at the bits you know are important and sort of tune out the rest.
Anyway, it looks like there’s a solution on the horizon. Our real-estate folks think they can get this handled on the provider side with no action on our part, since we have a smoking gun now.
Our first Christmas in the new apartment didn’t exactly go as planned. We were cold, unshowered, and couldn’t actually cook anything, and everything was closed so we couldn’t order any hot food in, but we had each other, plenty of blankets, a little green wine, cold-cuts and cheese+crackers, so it was alright in the end.
Thanks for sticking with us on this journey!
Até breve,
Alison (aka “snipe”)
