Hi, electric is switched off at mains when we leave the property. So is the water. How do I know which plan I’m on and how to I change it if Im on a higher one?
look at your Bill… and you should have a contract… somewhere.
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I have found a bill and it says Tarif Bleu. Puissance 06 kVa
Heures creuses 22h00 - 6h00
Look at what things you have running, hot water tank 1200-1800 watts. Lighting, LED or standard old lamps? Wall heaters towel rails? Kettles 2000-3000 watts so those two are 4800 watts so you have some spare depending on what else you have running. You could go up to 9kva, the next step up but do get off the HC/HP unless you use 40-45% of your electric overnight.
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@Corona
In France, right now… People are being urged to use electricity at night = off-peak !
To try and limit the surge at peak times = mealtimes
I’d say… hot water overnight… the rest used as and when needed. Laundry can be timed for overnight too and dishwasher if one ever gets one of those…
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I have the water tank. Heating and cooking is gas bottle and wood burner. Its only a pied a terre 1bed house. We use a camping kettle on the gas cooker. Theres a tv which is only in the evenings. An outdoor security light at night, a florescent light in kitchen which is on quite a bit as its an old house made from granite 1/4 metre thick walls.
Theres 1 small lamp. No led lamps. A normal light in bathroom. A washing machine used most days. I did have a tumble dryer for wet days but not working now. I could have all those on UNTIL you use an electric kettle then it would trip. And also a towel radiator in bathroom.
I’m wondering when the place was wired/rewired???
Whatever… your electricien can look into all this next Easter and ensure all works well…
lights out here now… night, night
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Might be a fault with the kettle- has it got a french plug/bought in France?
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French kettle brand new.
Hi Blondie,
6kva should be more than enough from what you’ve described.
I think you definitely don’t need HC/HP you can make a significant saving if you change to HP.
Are you on single or three phase
Have you tried the kettle on different sockets though out the house.
It seems strange that this has only happened since the linky was installed
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During the last year my electricity consumption has been 4515 kWh during the day (HP) and 3315 kWh at night (HC) which is just over 42% night usage.
Looking at EDF’s tarif bleu there is only an annual 46 euro saving by using the HP/HC option.
I’ll be looking to move away from HP/HC as it gives us more flexibility at very little additional cost.
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Its been happening for 16years not just linky was put in at Easter. No i havent tried a kettle in other sockets.
Im going to contact EDF and ask to have it changed.
I dont know what single or triple phase is, sorry. Ive learnt more tonight than I have since Ive had my house. Why didnt my dad explain all this or my brother? Both live in France. 16 years of paying too much. Argh. The only electrical item that is used akk night every night, is my husbands CPAP machine. Would that warrant keeping equiv of uk econ 7? Or should i still come off the hc?
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Sorry, I misunderstood something you said previously.
It will say on your bill, either “base” or HC/HP. There will also be two sets of readings if you have HC/HP. The Linky also tells you on one of it’s screens, as well as showing two readings if it’s HC/HP.
Contact your energy supplier by 'phone or email. There maybe the option to alter it via the espace client (different suppliers have differing websites).
As I said, a Linky meter can now be altered remotely so there’s no need for anyone to visit.
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I agree. I looked at my bills and worked out how much I used overall. When I factored in the white days, blue days and red days, and higher cost for actually having heures creuse tariff, it was obvious I was saving nothing. I changed to tariff bleu. I also fitted a plug to my chauffe eau and put it on a plug-in timer so that I could control its operation as I wanted. I read that it’s supposed be hard wired but I ignored that and I have had no problems over 12 or so years.
Now, this was many years ago, I can’t remember the detail. I do remember that soon after first moving here we had to raise the power to 9Kw, as the original equipment burned out when we were on 6Kw. Anyone interested in coming off heures creuse will have to do their own sums.
As an aside, We lived in France part time for a while, and the commune put all the electric and phone wires underground while we were away. When we came back in the summer our phone didn’t work. A year or so later I got a shock while changing a socket because the live was coming into my house on the neutral. I called the company, refused to get an electrician out as they recommended and insisted they sent out a technician, which I would pay for if proved to be wrong. They did. He donned protective gear and did some work on the junction box outside. I signed a form and heard no more about it, which is annoying as I now have no proof that it ever happened. I had expected to get some sort of notification. I suppose they didn’t want to admit liability.
All the regulated EDF tariffs are grouped under the heading of “Tarif Bleu”.
…which should not have been possible, even if the phase & neutral were swapped on the supply, as all circuits are supposed to have double pole isolation at the tableau. However, I have come across exactly this before.
A client decided to swap a socket himself; as he didn’t understand French he had no clue what the wording on his tableau meant so he plugged a table lamp into the relevant socket & flipped off breakers until he found the one that switched it off. All was now safe, he thought.
Whilst handling the wiring he managed to get an electric shock & I got a call… On examining the installation I found that the incoming phase & neutral were swapped (I suspect due to some hasty overhead line work that had been done after storm damage) & that the supposedly double pole isolated circuit still had mains voltage on the neutral, hence the shock.
It turned out that the cowboy builder who had created a loft conversion for the client had used one neutral for a collection of different circuits. That combined with the swapped mains supply meant that the neutral at the socket remained live - all flipping the circuit’s breaker had done was to cut the “neutral” (i.e. the live wire) whilst mains voltage was still very present at the socket on the blue/neutral wire, fed via another breaker that was still closed.
The moral of this story is that if you don’t have absolute certainty about the state of your wiring, don’t fiddle! If you really have to fiddle then throw the main supply breaker off before delving in.
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Indeed - the presence of that breaker ahead of the tableau is one of the things I vastly prefer about the French way of doing things. In the UK the main breaker is the one in the consumer unit - which means there’s no way to render the whole panel safe and a lot of sparkeys wind up working on the CU (including changing CUs) live - can’t be good for one’s health.
I’d echo @Badger’s advice - even if you have flipped the breaker use a non contact tester to make sure nothing is live & that does mean everything, when doing some work in the house I got a shock off a wire which was unmistakably green and I assumed (wrongly) it was earth.
Talking of Neutral/Phase swaps I nearly had kittens when i plugged my installation tester in to a few sockets and L/N seemed swapped on the first two - I’d bought one of these:
for use with the tester in France. Turns out it is wired to the German patten and swaps Live & Neutral if plugged into a correctly wired French socket!
This is true of many adaptors, extension reels, etc. Rather than cross the internal connections over they are made the cheapest possible way & it’s normal to find four sockets on an extension reel - two wired one way, & two the other.
My socket tester travels with such a double adaptor so that I can reverse the polarity when I find an installed socket that is wired incorrectly (which is often as there is no official right or wrong under NF C 15-100). I wouldn’t mind if an installation was consistently “wrong”, but it’s not uncommon to find differences on the same circuit 
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UK 1, France 0 