Energy Freak Show

Had a great family trip to Italy in August.  Nik and I still haven’t recovered at work, which is one reason we haven’t posted in so long.

The whole time we were there I was checking out the energy situation.  Here’s a few things I noticed…

1. Some incandescent, non-efficient lighting remains.  I was expecting EVERYTHING to be state of the art efficient.  But everywhere we stayed there was some unholy combination of edison bulbs, halogens, CFL’s and LED’s.  The big villa, where we spent a week with Nik’s family, had a couple of CFL’s on a three way switch.  The switch was not designed to work with CFL’s and one night we got the switches in the wrong position and the bulbs flashed ALL NIGHT LONG (did I mention they were in our bedroom?)  Well, Nik unscrewed them after a while, but they would have flashed forever.
2. Very old buildings get used for lots of different things over time.  I’m pretty sure our apartment in Rome used to be a garage, and before that…  Maybe a stable?  Comfort and air quality were fine, but I’d guess it gets kind of chilly in the winter.
3. On demand water heaters are the norm.  They’re noisy, but not awful, and I guess people are just accustomed to that.
4. The apartment in Venice was on the ground level: very damp and smelly.  There were dehumidifiers there, but they were off when we arrived.  To keep that place comfortable would have taken a lot of energy.  It’s a doomed apartment.  Someday soon the water will come up and not recede and that apartment will be under water.
   

   Old and new coexisting in Rome.

5. Our gondolier (great guy named Luca; look him up if you go to Venice luckyluca6@hotmail.com) told us that permitting to do work on historic buildings takes so long that buildings decay from not having the cement coating replaced often enough.  Very sad to see the buildings in such poor shape.
6. In Rome they had a carshare, but I only saw one car.  In a smallish town in Le Marche we saw a bikeshare rack filled with bikes.
7. There were bidets in every bathroom (except public bathrooms, but those had toilet brushes, which I thought was a very nice touch.)  Not sure what that has to do with energy, but it certainly says something about the culture.
8. Garbage was picked up EVERY day at your door in both Rome and Venice.  In the countryside you can take your garbage to a roadside collection point (never very far) for free.  Very clean every where.  Littering must be socially repugnant.  Now that I think of it, why do we charge people to keep tidy?  Garbage disposal should be free!
9. It appears that the settlement pattern in the hill country is something that only would have arisen when it was not common to leave home frequently.  The roads are very contorted.  Homes and villages are sprinkled about with no apparent thought to transportation efficiency.  It’s nice to imagine a time when one had everything one needed right there at home: work, food, companionship, inspiration, entertainment…  Spending time traveling really eats into the day.  Urban as we are, while at the villa in the countryside we drove somewhere nearly everyday.  It took me most of the week just to not get carsick at every trip.
10. No clothes dryers.  Wherever there was a washing machine there was a way to hang clothes.  In Venice, Luca called the hanging laundry “traditional Venetian decoration”.
11. In the city the buildings are covered in grime.  I’d guess it’s vehicle exhaust.  Only restored buildings were clean.  I imagine it’s a huge amount of work to continually counteract the cumulative effect of hundreds of thousands of little oil fires burning all day long.  In Venice the problem is gasoline and diesel boats.  Same problem, even worse fuel efficiency.

Have any stories about energy-related oddities from your travels?