[Anonymous]

Hi I am new to all this so i hope i am doing things the right way (if not i am sure someone will let me know)I am about to bring some light fittings over to spain to our new house where the wiring is protruding from either wall or cieling is it easy enough to wire up lighting and is there anything i should look out for. Any help would be appriecated
basher

[Anonymous]

Hiya,

I think its like the UK and you are meant to have a certified electrician fit lights..

If you have just brought the house, check the wiring is OK before touching, earth wires don’t seem so common here and old spanish wiring is notoriously awful..so dangerous!!

The other thing to watch is that you don’t put anything too electricity hungry in the house as unless you get your supplier to upgrade the fusebox, you will trip the system very easily…we have the highest you can get thats not commercial and still trip the switch if the washing machine, dishwasher, hob and kettle are all on at once….

Don’t touch it unless you really know what you are doing is my advice….

Heather

[Anonymous]

Just to reinforce Heather’s view with a story of my experience.

In our new apartment we brought all of the light fitting from the UK and i fitted them myself, no real trick just wire them as you would at home taking care that the power is completely off at the box (not just the switch.) i did have one issue with a “set of wires ” and i asked the developer to send an electrician who (wonder of wonders) arrived at our door with a cardboard box. Well it looked like a cardboard box to me, in fact it was a tool box to him.

In this tool box he had a screw driver, choc-block, cutters and wire, plus a light bulb with two flying leads attached. The light bulb was his sole piece of test equipment. He attached the “test equipment” to the “set of wires” and swore (i think) a lot, playing with bits of cable behind various panels until he got it working, packed up his “tool box” and left.

So be careful out there but at least the test equipment is cheap in Spain, as are tool boxes.

Regards

Paul

[Anonymous]

main issue is bulds!!

Try to bring fittings with screw in type bulds rather than the bayonet type.

Some english shops out here do sell some UK bulds but not the full range etc and the buld holder can’t really be changed as it’s a different size mechanism.

As someone already mentioned Spanish wiring is sub-standard and very poor and it will trip out a lot which means you will be forever resetting electrical clocks on ovens, microwaves – after a while you just give up!

Up until recently (10 to 15 years ago) it was acceptable not to run earth wires to most plugs and a kitchen might only have 2 single plugs and generally every room is short on plugs and that can mean items requiring an earth don’t always have one. The good news is that as the use tubing you can normally pull earth wires through.

I once asked why this was the case and an engineer explained to me that it was the multiplication of cents that made it expensive (ie multiply all the additional pugs for all the house the developer is building and that’s a lot of money!!). I argued it was so expensive to rectify afterwards and so cheap to do during construction.

You will need to rebalance your fuse box or consumer unit to split out overloaded circuits (the ones that keep tripping). Also over here they don’t always run separate circuits for hobs and ovens and it’s acceptable to plug these into any circuit – in fact unlike UK they even come with pre-fitted standard plugs!! Avoid all Spanish kitchen appliances and only buy German makes!

I have even seen these problems in apartments/houses buit in the last 2 to 3 years and I’m not talking about any house built more than 15 years ago.

Find yourself a good electrician!!!

[Author]

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