The French phone is only used to give a contact number to delivery companies, artisans and so on. So messages to it are comparatively rare. The one the weekend before Christmas from Orange was ominous as well as rare - "Due to storms in your area we recommend that you disconnect your Livebox modem". After our experience last summer, when a lightning strike fried our Livebox, our one had been disconnected before we left - so all OK there then. The email I received the next day from Nicole was a bit more worrying: "Did you leave the lights on in your house? They weren't on last night and I seem to remember they were on before."
Kindly Nicole went in and reset the EDF breaker to restore power, checked our freezers were working and locked up again (in France one subscribes to the supply of a maximum number of kilowatts and there is a main electricity switch in the EDF supply board which trips out if too much power is drawn or there's a major fault somewhere - like a lightning strike).
When we got home ten days later the fridge was a disgusting shade of green and we soon found a number of inoperative electrical devices - fridge, hob extractor, one of the underfloor thermostats, a printer - nine in all. None of the neighbours recall a thunderstorm but some sort of voltage surge had trashed nearly fifteen hundred euros of our electrical equipment.
The insurance company were remarkably sanguine about things, after the June event we knew the drill and had all the purchase receipts ready for sending on to them. As unfortunately one of the damaged items was our printer we had to call in some favours from neighbours to get invoices scanned. As it was the second claim in six months AXA sent in an expert electrical assessor to view the items, and here's where things started to get very - shall we say - French.
M. Zug the assessor arrived from Lorient 45 minutes early for the appointment, we had all the faulty items laid out ready for inspection with the invoices and receipts. He first spent 20 minutes reading our policy documents and trying to tell me we weren't covered for voltage surge damage; in exasperation I called Karine at the insurance agency. "Pwthhhh - what does he know? Put him on the phone and I'll put him right." was her response. Five minutes of rapid fire French later and M. Zug turned to the matter at hand and consulted our claim list - "Ah yes, a built-in fridge, that's why it's so expensive" was the sum total of his assessment of our claim. He then proceeded to type out the information on our list on his computerised assessment software (with help from me when he couldn't work out euro/pound exchange rates), asked me to agree the final total, told me what I already knew that we had a policy excess and asked me to agree the amount we would receive. No assessment of any kind of the damage, no request to assess if the items were repairable, no questioning of the value of our six year old obsolete printer and no consideration of finding out if the cheap power supply or the actual equipment had failed. Good for us but not sure what value our insurers got from this exercise, 250 kilometres travel and half a day of an electrical expert can't be cheap.
I've more to say about the repair process in a future post or two but, for now and for anyone who doesn't know what a voltage surge can do, here are a couple of pictures of blown components and burnt tracks on the circuit board from the extractor hood:
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