Looks like the PN’s night tariff plans aren’t so very giggle-inducing after all
I realised just how backward Maltese society is in these matters, and how uninformed about what happens elsewhere in the civilised world, when the Nationalist Party proposed a night tariff system in the last general election campaign and the Labour Party produced a video mocking it.
The video showed people running their dishwasher and washing machine at night as though this was something outrageous and ridiculous.
And instead of understanding that it was the Labour Party’s view which was ridiculous and outdated, based as it is on the notion that every household has a woman around during the day to do the laundry and load the dishwasher and a failure to understand that in most normal European households these things are done at night because there’s nobody around in the day anyway, the electorate joined the Labour Party in giggling.
And now the Labour Party, finding itself in government partly with the help of that mockery, has decided that night tariffs are a very European idea after all and pretty useful.
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http://www.independent.com.mt/articles/2014-10-16/local-news/PN-s-controversial-energy-night-tariff-proposal-will-be-considered-by-government-after-all-6736123870
Well yes, but trust the imbecilic subliterate papers to print the wrong things. The proposal wasn’t “controversial”, but “sensible”.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4yZluF4rwdI
So he based his logic on unit cost. Or better, he deemed it highly irresponsible if prices were reduced without a corresponding reduction in production costs.
Now what Dr.Konrad Mizzi?
Our household does the laundry at night already and the water heater’s off during the day.
What were they laughing about? The laugh’s on them.
I see it’s open season on Konrad Mizzi while Muscat gets away it, yet again. You can always tell when things aren’t going as planned. Muscat disappears from the scene.
It depends what you mean by night tariff. Here in the UK its between 11:30pm and 6:30am. I’m more likely to wash clothes and plates, after work at 8pm rather than 11:30 I suppose and this would be also applicable to Malta.
[Daphne – I have long found Maltese people’s attitudes towards their washing machine truly fascinating. They talk and behave as though it needs babysitting and they have to be there when it stops turning, or while it is turning. ‘Just in case’, they tell me. In case of what? Night tariffs or no night tariffs, the most efficient way to go about the laundry is to press the On switch before you go to bed so that you can hang them out immediately you wake up, before you go to work, and so that you don’t have to hang around the house in the morning waiting for the wet clothes to come out of the machine if you don’t work. Why would you wash your clothes at 8pm? Are you asleep already at 11.30pm when your night tariff begins? Gosh.]
My dishwasher and washingmachine/dryer have a timer, as do most modern ones. I set the timer to go off at 2 in the morning so, as Daphne said, I can put the clothes and dishes away first thing when I wake up. This is perfectly normal practice in civilised Europe and it about time the Maltese join the 20th century and do so also.
[Daphne – You’re right on that score. I never think about timers because I’m never early to bed and haven’t used a tumbledryer for years, but yes, you would need to use a timer if tumbledrying, because the clothes have to be smoothed out and folded before they cool down and the creases set hard. The weather and nature of homes in Malta mean that most people dry their laundry naturally – which costs nothing, is environmentally sound and better for all clothes except towels – so they needn’t even bother with a timer which makes their complaints even sillier. Not that a timer is any bother.]
That would mean I have to wake up earlier to hang them.
[Daphne – Well, if you’re planning to have a family at any point, you’d better get some training in on that score.]
But I take your point. Certainly I’m not gonna do any ironing at 11:30PM I’m afraid.
[Daphne – You shouldn’t be doing any ironing at all. In your position, you should be paying somebody else to do it for you and creating employment for others. After all, it’s not as though you have a family to support. This is another quirk of Maltese culture: the belief that we must do our own ironing, when it is just another job that can be farmed out. And yes, of course ironing should not be done at night. The only electricity-consuming choresthat should be done at night are the ones in which there is no labour involved, which means all of them except ironing.]
I polish my own shoes. Does that count?
Well. I’m not “caked” (as we say up here) to get someone to iron the clothes.. and early working hours sometimes necessitate the need to sleep early, but anyway this shouldn’t be an issue in Malta!
“This is another quirk of Maltese culture: the belief that we must do our own ironing,”
Daphne, what? Am I really understanding you correctly? You are promoting the hiring of a person to do our ironing?
Growing up we had a maid who also did our ironing. To me it seemed so “Maltese”….having the maid.
And since not both my parents were Maltese it seemed like something my non-Maltese parent went along with reluctantly because that’s what the Maltese did.
Now I don’t live in Malta, and in a place were you would be made fun of for being extremely privileged and stuck up for not doing something like your own ironing….kind of like the new middle class you make fun of in Malta.
[Daphne – You couldn’t be more wrong, I’m afraid. In big cities throughout Europe (I wouldn’t know about the United States, though I would say it’s probably the same in New York City) even young people hire others to clean out their flats and do their ironing at least once a week, the reason being that they’re out of the house between 8am and 9pm every day, have grocery shopping and various errands to do on Saturday, and don’t want to spend their Sunday doing the housework.
Your assumption that these ‘maids’ are necessarily women is wrong.
It’s completely normal. You must live somewhere provincial, surrounded by people with a chip on their shoulder, if you think otherwise. People like that fail to understand that hiring somebody to clean and iron is actually a good thing because it creates employment for those who need it. Instead they see it as ‘patronising’. It makes me wonder why they don’t take their own rubbish sacks to the landfill site themselves because they don’t want to have others collect it from their doorstep.
My advice to anybody setting up home is always to make this a priority in your budget however little money you have, and even if it means that you then can’t afford things like the occasional restaurant meal. The amount of time it frees up, the way it cuts down on stress and bad temper and fights over who does what, are invaluable. And as a highly desirable by-product, a source of income is created for somebody who needs it. That is not to be underestimated.]
Certainly the trend seems to be to buy non iron shirts, and avoid the need of having to iron anything at all.. not that I agree.
[Daphne – Non-iron shirts are seriously criminal, and when coupled with Maltese men’s reluctance to use anti-perspirant, God help us all.]
Daphne, I understand your opinion. We must just live a very different life. I live in a major North American city, and while I completely get your argument about giving other people a job, I know of very few people in my social circle who do that.
Personally, I see better ways to spend my money, on putting my children in sport programs for example, and saving money on things I can do myself.
[Daphne – Better ways to spend your money than giving an income to people who need one, and freeing up time for yourself and your family? Tsk tsk. Besides which, if the two of you are working, you can afford those sports programmes and a cleaner once a week too.]
As an almost outsider to Malta now, I (and my spouse) see the thing about having a maid (never did I say this has to be a woman) as a very Maltese thing.
[Daphne – That’s odd. From the outside, major US cities (or are you in Canada?) appear to be teeming with Latino maids, to the point where the authorities are reluctant to crack down on the illegal immigrant quotient because the entire system would collapse into maid-free chaos. Or are the news reports wrong? Having somebody in to clean the house is most certainly not ‘a Maltese thing’. It happens the world over and is so popular and necessary in Europe that most major cities and towns here on this continent have a sizable population of people from The Philippines who do exactly that, and who meet up every Sunday morning at one of the Catholic churches and have a picnic afterwards.]
My experience of the Maltese people in my extended family and friends and people I may have worked with is contrary to the “quirk of Maltese culture” that you see. We see it as Maltese thing that you can’t actually be seen to be doing your own cleaning and laundry. You have to hire “the help”.
[Daphne – Did you grow up in a family with social anxiety, the sort where you are programmed to be ‘nice’ all the time in case people think you’re a ‘baxxa’? Well, I didn’t. I have absolutely no problems doing my own housework and being seen doing my own housework, but as somebody who is extremely conscious of time management, I am aware of the wisdom of paying somebody to do things which others can do so that I can concentrate on doing the things that only I can do, or want to do. You appear to believe that social anxiety about not having a maid is somehow different to social anxiety about having one. It isn’t. The two anxieties are flipsides of the same coin and the result of the same mindset. You will find them in exactly the same kinds of people. I am afraid you are a case in point: raised with social anxiety about not having a maid, and transferring that anxiety with your new location to having a maid. In my world, it’s somebody who is paid to do a job, just like a secretary, or a gardener, or a personal assistant. No difference.]
There are a number of things that I don’t miss about living in Malta, and why an attempt at returning was short-lived, and this privileged attitude of many Maltese people is one of them.
[Daphne – You clearly haven’t mingled with many WASPs or any real money in North America if you believe ordinary Maltese people have a ‘privileged’ attitude. I think what you may mean, and in this I would agree with you completely, is that Maltese people are spoiled and childish. But having a maid has nothing to do with that. The problems are far deeper.]
Sorry, even if one went to bed before 11.30pm or even at 9pm at that, it makes no difference since many appliances have inbuilt timers. I usually time my washing machine to start at 4am or 5am, so my laundry is fresh and ready to hang out to dry before I am out of the house early morning.
[Daphne – Up to you, but that level of neurosis is completely unnecessary. Your wet laundry will be fresh anyway, even if it has sat around wet in the machine for four hours waiting for you to get up and hang it out to dry. So this is the reason why Maltese women sit around the house waiting for the machine to finish doing its job so that they can pounce and take out the clothes immediately it stops turning: so the laundry will be ‘fresh’. Finally, I have my answer to the mystery which has foxed me for 30 years.]
Could be that for some. I use this strategy to have less items needing ironing, but maybe it is a false belief of mine.
[Daphne – Yes, it’s false. Creases don’t set in wet clothes. The crumpling is caused by cramming, so if you want less ironing, put fewer clothes in the machine. But there’s a cost to that.]
If I may: there’s nothing that some good, energetic elbow action won’t fix. No, Ciccio, I didn’t mean that.
In any case, there are just three items in a man’s wardrobe than need ironing: shirts, handkerchiefs, and trousers which are actually pressed, not ironed. Socks don’t need ironing. Neither do shreddies, or towels, or tea towels, or sports wear unless it’s cricket. Bedsheets require no ironing unless it’s a barracks or a bordello.
Controversial? We’re signing contracts with China, we don’t get to know what those contracts are, we hear that the process is not as far along as the PL said it was, we see one too many iced-buns being handed out and yet the newspaper calls this controversial. I give up!
With smart meters on most houses in most of the towns and cities in North America, the household electricity deals are typically full rate between 7:00 and 5:00 during the day, one quarter price discount between 5:00 and 7:00 in the evening and a half price between 7:00 PM to 7:00 AM.
Where I live this has proven to be too popular and the discount rates will not be so generous starting next month.
7pm is a better call!
And electricity is half price on week-ends and holidays too.
The sad thing as far as the consumer is concerned is that you still get dinged with a higher price whether you conserve electrical power or you use it like there was no tomorrow.
If the utility company makes less profit in a given year through less consumption and demand, they up the price of electricity to make up for the profit loss.
This year we had a rather cool summer where I live, so less money was made by the utility company, as people used air-conditioning much less this year but the price of electricity went up.
The discount rates will be made less attractive next month, as people have caught on and are doing their baking and laundry on week-ends or after 7:00 PM during the week.
There is no real break for the consumer, the big boys play a rigged shell game with us that is guaranteed to fleece us.
The previous government was also right when several energy saving bulbs were distributed to every household.
The Italians are launching it now:
http://youtu.be/LQwpCK7T1Rw
that video is in March?
Call me whatever you like but with this government proposing to purchase all the electricity generated by Shanghai Electric and Electrogas I suppose Enemalta won’t have enough money to reemburse me with the extra power my PVs generate. So come winter I will turn on my electric heaters instead the ones which work with gas.
What really is controversial is that Muscat had the idea six years ago and included it in his 15 point plan on energy.
http://www.timesofmalta.com/articles/view/20081111/local/muscats-15-point-plan-to-ease-energy-burden.232670
Croatia has night tariffs. It is a very good idea actually because it encourages people to do the laundry and use the dishwasher etc when industry has shut down for the day and there is excess load. It also puts less burden on the power supply during business hours.
In Italy we are practically forced to use the washing machine/tumble dryer/dish washer at night – for a reason which has nothing to do with night tariffs, although there is a night tariff from 1900 to 0600.
We do so because residential electricity consumption is limited. In one household one can consume only up to a certain voltage at a given time. This means that if you switch on an oven and a washing machine at the same time then the power immediately goes off for over consumption.
When in Malta I always find it so odd to see oven, dishwasher, hair dryer and electric kettle on at the same time. Here it’s impossible unless you enter into special contracts for higher consumption at non-residential tariffs (a lot higher, of course).
Therefore in order to avoid having to switch the washing machine off half way through a cycle because you’ve turned on the hair dryer, you have no choice but to restrict use of appliances which function on their to the night, when you are not using any of the others.
You don’t consume voltage, you consume energy
Note that there are persons out there who have degrees and masters in engineering and who still voted for this lot and believed that the power station project as proposed could be implemented in the time frames stated by Kon Rod.
Degrees never guaranteed sanity did they?
I see there are still people around who have not realised that a degree or masters is no measure of one’s intelligence. Most people graduating these days are less educated than your average 14 year-old Church-school school-leaver in the 1950s.
With all respect Mr. Gatt , I don’t think you know what your’e talking about
Some observations:
Without Austin Gatt’s smart meters, night tariffs would have been impossible.
The prepaid system which Labour proposed would not be successful.
Konrad will introduce a variety of tariffs (pre-paid, flat rate and peak/off-peak tariff) to choose from, coercing families to “choose” night tariffs.
“Tonio ma takx għażla, Konrad itik l-għażla.”
Mark my words.
Night-time tariffs exist to reduce the burden on power stations during the day and to spread the load to the night when generators might otherwise be idle.
As every English schoolchild knows, because it’s part of the geography syllabus, night-time tariffs encourage households to use appliances that draw a heavy load from the grid at a time when offices and industry are not functioning.
It has nothing to do with women not being able to turn their washing machine on during the day because they’re at work. Industry and services have to use electricity during the day as it’s when their customers and workforce are there, but washing machines, dishwashers and hot water heaters don’t need to be on during the day.
It’s the same reason the hydro electric dam exists in Wales – to meet the needs of the sudden surge in demand during the commercial break in Coronation Street or a big football game when people rush to turn the kettle on.
So saying we’re going to set our alarms to iron or watch TV in the middle of the night completely misses the point. It’s not for our benefit, it’s for the power station.
It is the exact same principle as when supermarkets here give special offers or discounts on Tuesdays.
Evening out the load on cashiers reduces the cost for the business. This is not rocket science. However for the multitude who listen to the bible according to Joseph and do not read, compare or think, a good thing which becomes a bad thing then again a good thing is understandably confusing.
It is no surprise that science and most Maltese do not mix. One needs a certain mindset for science and as little gullibility as possible.
Do the Maltese actually know how electricity (“id-dawl”. Says it all) is generated and distributed? Because I’m starting to wonder.