Hi there
In the summer of last year, we changed electricity companies and asked for a power increase. As we were going to exchange houses in November, we wanted the person who was coming to have enough power to put in the heating they needed.
The power we had was 3.45 kVA and we wanted to increase it to 5.75 kVA.
We had gone through the previous winter without a problem, but we had to be careful because if we turned on too many things at once, the power would cut out and we would have to reset the meter on the outside of the house.
We made the request with Golden Energy, and we got an email saying that they could not increase the power because the certified power of the house was lower.
We started to investigate, and we needed an electrotechnical sheet in order to certify the power increase. For this, we had to find a certified electrician who could do the procedure.
Rui, who had fixed my gate, put me in touch with Nuno Fernandes, who came to my house at the beginning of October and told me that the electrical installation seemed to be well done so there was no problem increasing the power.
He installed a piece in the electrical box in the downstairs room to make the installation even more secure and sent us the electrotechnical sheet.
We sent the documentation to Golden Energy, and they told us that we had to manage it with E-redes.
Here it should be noted that in Spain it is the distributor that does all this.
We immediately went to the E-redes website to place the order and it said that it could take up to “2 years”. I almost had a heart attack.
I wanted to have everything ready for November 1st, which was when our home exchange started, and I thought that one month would be more than enough.
On the website we were watching how the process was going and when it had a week in “orçamentação”, I asked the electrician if it was normal. He told me that it didn’t make sense for them to take a week to quote for something that was already done.
I then decided to leave complaints in Livro de Reclamações and in Portal Queixa so that they would hurry up. There, almost immediately we received the email that they had approved the power increase, but they are so incompetent that they sent the email with the wrong power and put 3.45kVA instead of 6.90kVA, which was what the electrician certified.
We paid almost 100 euros for E-Redes to do absolutely nothing and as is common in Porto, they did not send the invoices, so I also had to file claims for that.
As the email had the wrong power, I immediately called E-redes and they confirmed that they had made a mistake in writing the email and that the certified power had been increased to 6.90kVA, but that now the engineer who had certified the power increase had to go through yet another procedure with DGEG.
The bureaucracy was endless.
My electrician tried to do it, but the website was giving an error.
I proceeded to complain to DGEG and they called me immediately to tell me that the engineer had to send a screenshot of the error to a specific email that was on the web page and that “it could take a long time since they had a lot of work”.
My electrician proceeded to send the email with the screenshot of the error.
In total, it was almost 400 euros paid to be able to increase the power of the house from 3.45kVA to 5.75kVA and almost two months of meaningless bureaucracy.
This is another example of the reality of Portugal.