I've Been Taking My Bath Wrong

The other day I removed twenty-five €2 coins from a small plastic box attached to a wall of the back porch and replaced them in their basket. Later that day I handed my landlady a brown envelope with a €50 note in it. If you don't understand what's going on, I'll explain below.

When I handed her the envelope, I said, "We'll be burning more electricity because I'm taking showers every day. The bath water is too cold in the mornings now."

And she said, "Oh, don't you know about the immersion? I thought I showed it to you when you moved in."

We have an immersion?

She explained how I could turn on the immersion with a switch in the hot press. 

Of course. 

I went back inside and as soon as I saw the switch near the floor  I remembered she had pointed it out when we moved in. 

Irish electricity is complicated.

At the two other houses we've lived in, consumption of electrical power registered on a meter at the back of the house. We paid the electric company for kilowatts consumed, just like I do in Santa Cruz. At this house I buy €2 coins from my landlady, and insert them into a slot, like a pay-as-you-go telephone.

Pre-covid, the landlady would have entered our back porch and with a tiny padlock key opened and emptied the box herself. Post-covid, she loaned me the key once, and I leave the lock open, recycling the twenty-five coins as needed. She trusts me that way.

I had heard about houses with coin-operated electricity before, but didn't understand it. I assumed I misunderstood because a landlord coming around to service the electricity meter like a vending machine would be silly.

Since that conversation with my landlady, I can take a hot bath anytime I want, as long as I remember a hour before I want to.

In our house "the boiler" heats water for the radiators, sinks and bathtub. We turn it on for a few hours in the morning and again in the late afternoon. (It burns kerosene.) We're comfortable enough. Water for sinks and bathtub is stored in a three-foot tank in a closet in a bedroom.

Another word for "closet" is "clothes press" so a " 'press" that is always warm because the hot water is stored there is the "hot press." It's where you keep your bed linens.

What my landlady told me is that the tank in the hot press also has an on-demand heating element. This is the immersion. Some immersions have "kitchen" and "bath" options, which heat different degrees, or maybe volumes, of water. This I don't know yet.

If you google "did you you turn off the immersion" you'll learn about an anxious and ancient Irish obsession.

This bit by comedian Des Bishop explains:

(I actually don't like this comedian. He is cringy and self-conscious. Some of his bits are sexist or just lame. But he gives Irish people the chance to make fun of Americans in Ireland, and they deserve the opportunity.) 

 

I've noticed other oddities of electricity in Ireland: hotels that require you to put the room key in a slot before the lights come on. No electrical outlets in the bathroom, and lights operated with a pull string instead of a switch. Every receptacle has an on/off switch of its own.

I understood these to be signs of electricity as a rare and dangerous force only lately introduced.

But on the other hand: there's a fecking electric on-demand heater in every shower. That one actually scared me. In my early visits I told no one I was afraid to stand naked and soaking wet six inches from a 220V appliance.

These experiences left me curious if this was "just Ireland" or if the rest of Europe did their electricity differently. Recently, my favorite podcast, The Irish Passport, devoted an episode on the electrification of Ireland that answered all my questions.

Industrial Revolution began in Great Britain when Ireland was part of the UK, but they never brought the benefits and abominations of industrialization to the Irish countryside. After independence, the government of the new country knew that generating electric power and building a national grid would be necessary for survival.

In 1925 Ireland built a hydroelectric dam across the Shannon at Ardnacrusha. Once they had a central source of electric power, a new Electricity Supply Board implemented a plan to methodically electrify the entire country.

A program about Ardnacrusha on its 85th anniversary. From a public affairs show called Nationwide which only covers good news. I am a devoted viewer.

Because Ireland was so poor, the infrastructure arrived slowly, townland by townland. One townland might move from sixteenth to the twentieth century over a summer, and the next village over could remain in a time capsule for another decade. They didn't finish until 1978. The uneven distribution of electric service contributed to the abandonment of townlands that leave Ireland with its picturesque ruins and isolated burial grounds. (Something similar is happening with the rollout of broadband, but that's another post.)

This slow deployment of the electric grid, and its relatively recent arrival is why I slip coins into my power meter.

The podcast includes wonderful interviews with women who remember the arrival of the washing machine and the electric range. Some of them signed contracts with the Electrical Services Board to hold twice-monthly workshops teaching their neighbors how to use electric appliances. In exchange for two years of their marketing meetings, they were given "a new kitchen."

The program is worth the time if you're interested in cultural history and its intersection with women's freedom and technology.

I mentioned what I had learned to a friend of mine, and she told me she cooked all her family's meals on a turf-fuel "range" until the 1990s. She is proud of how she could control the heat of the oven, measuring it with her bare hand, and raising and lowering the temperature under the pots by moving them around the cooking surface.

It might have been something like this. When I lived in an old farmhouse in Soquel, we were astounded to see that our gas range also burned wood, but were afraid to ever use it. 

She also mentioned that the house she lived in came with turbury rights: the deed of your house came with the right to cut turf from a bog. Enough for every hearth, and no more. 

A right of turbary in relation to bogland, in its simplest form, means the right to cut and carry away turf from a specific plot of bogland, and includes the right of preparing and storing on the bogland any turf that you cut from it. ...

The right to take turf for fuel in a house does not attach to the lands, but attaches to the dwelling house situate on the lands: it cannot be apportioned or severed from the dwelling house. (Irish Examiner.)

She told me that when she bought their house in the 70s, the agent took her over to a bog near Glen about eight miles away where she and her husband cut turf for their household every year. I asked how you knew where you could cut, and she said because someone showed you. 

Now that I'm finished writing this, I'd like to take a bath. 

But I forgot to turn on the immersion.