You know you're in Italy...

...when the power suddenly goes off if you're using the oven, your laptop, and some lights, and you decide to boil water. In Italy, you only use 3kW of power at any given time, as explained by expatsinitaly.com:

The company that handles electricity in Italy is ENEL. Electricity in Italy is not like in the US where you can use as much as you need and then just pay every month. Instead, here, you are allotted 3.0 kW. If you use more than this at any one time your power will shut off. That means no running of the washing machine and a hair dryer at the same time. Because of this, looking for appliances with an A or A+ rating* is even more important. You can increase your usage, to 4.5 or 6 which works well but you do pay more per unit of measure. I have 4.5 and am able to run 2 large things plus 2 TVs, 2 refrigerators, a computer, a freezer, a fish tank and lights but if I try to turn on anything else the power will blow. Because we have a water pump (autoclave) we do have to be careful as this consumes a lot and we tend to forget when we have a few things going at once that if we flush or wash our hands the power may go off.

Not plugged in

Italy is a developed country, right? So you'd think that something as simple as plugging something into an electrical outlet would be straightforward. Well, you'd have thought wrong. That’s because in addition to the power in most apartments being limited to 3 kW (which is apparently low enough that you can’t iron when you’re running the washing machine, though you can choose to pay for more power), there are three different systems of electrical plugs and outlets, each one incompatible with the others. I ran into this problem yesterday, when I bought a microwave and wanted to plug it in. It turned out that the microwave had a Schuko plug (bottom left), which doesn’t fit into the socket in the kitchen (top left). Also, I bought a power strip at Ikea so that I could plug in both my laptop and external hard drive at the same time (that’s another thing – there are never enough sockets in Italian apartments), but it had a 16 A three-prong plug (bottom center), which has a different prong spacing and thickness than the 10 A outlet (top right) that is in place where I have my computer stuff.

So today, I went to a hardware store to stock up on adapters. In addition to several Schuko to 16 A adapters, I also got a 3-to-1 10 A adapter, so that I can plug in my computer stuff. The result, including the plug adapters that convert from US plugs to European standard plugs, is pictured bottom right. Somehow I get the feeling that even though all these systems were designed to be incompatible for safety reasons, all of these adapters and multisockets end up making it all the more dangerous.