Lights & TV etc

[steveastralis]

We have just completed on an apartment on lake Como and have the usual hassles of moving in - kitchen, lights, box to buy, kids entertainment to sort etc!!

does anyone know if wall lights bought in England would work OK and have the same wiring (red, blue/black, yellow/green etc) as in Italy?

does anyone have info on TV. If I buy a TV from UniEuro/Iperal - how easy is it to set up (will I be able to switch to Englsh language set up?) and what sort of channels might we expect from 'freeview' - anything in English? On the presumption that there will be v little English content, I may need a Wii and/or DVD player - again if I buy in Italy will I be stumped on language (I am learning but at 1 lesson a week it could take me years!).

regards

Steve

[NickZ]

Just ask the shop to show you the manual. Mine came with the normal EU bundle. Italian,English,Spanish etc. OTA I can't think of any English stations. But a satellite dish costs less then a good antennea. With that you can get a little English. Mostly news stations of various kinds.

[Charles Phillips]

The wall lights will work. Hopefully (though do use a mains tester screwdriver thing at the very least to check) the earth wire (if there is one) will be green or green and yellow, the live wire will be brown, or blue, and the neutral wire will be blue, or black. (I am not joking!)

Italy used to use blue for live and black for neutral, but if the wiring is recent it will follow the european standard of brown as live and blue as neutral. Any black wire should be a neutral, and any green wre should be an earth.

[coppicer]

The only problem we have found with using English light fittings in Italy is with external lights with sensors - they flicker a bit with the slightly lower voltage otherwise fine. On the wiring as already said it depends when your house was wired. In ours there are no rules any colour is anything and there is NO earth. You just have to do it by testing.

[Italiargh]

yep in our place Blue wire is for live and Neutral wire is...Blue too

As for 'Freeview', i just brought a cheapy box, where not only was there a choice of language for the system, it also had an option for the language for the TV programme itself ie, did i want English as the 1st choice (where available). In our area we can't recieve all channels but we get BBC World, which isn't great, but still better than a poke in the eye...

[Noble]

English wall lights...? Yes but if the fittings are bayonet, don't forget to bring over English light bulbs as they are all screw in here!

[libero]

hi steve
I've taken a Voltage Indication Stick over.
only £11.49 at screwfix


Kewstick One Voltage Indication Stick - Screwfix.com, Where the Trade Buys

[chrisnotton]

Originally Posted by Noble

English wall lights...? Yes but if the fittings are bayonet, don't forget to bring over English light bulbs as they are all screw in here!

Buy some converters for your lights:

http://www.italymag.co.uk/forums/bui...html#post87217

Pip pip

[Gala Placidia]

Originally Posted by Noble

English wall lights...? Yes but if the fittings are bayonet, don't forget to bring over English light bulbs as they are all screw in here!

You can also find bayonet bulbs in France if you are close to the border.

[AllanMason]

On the subject of manuals, all the major electronics companies will have a website where you should be able to download an English language manual for any pieces of kit bought in Italy. (That's if the manual doesn't already have an English section – and I have come across those.)

However, some companies seem to delight in producing products that differ only slightly in specification but have very different model numbers, so it's possible you might have to do some lateral thinking to find the manual you want.

It's been some time since I had the Freeview box set up here in the wilds of Abruzzo. The selection of programmes available the last time I looked was decidedly underwhelming, but I'm fairly certain that BBC World was available. Which is pretty crap, really, unless you happen to be a businessman in a hotel in Tashkent and want a brief summary of news and sport before you fall asleep.

There are good odds that, since your place is as far north as Lake Como, you should be able to get decent satellite reception of all the free satellite channels that you can get in the UK with a dish that's not that much bigger than the ones used in Britain. Something around the 1 metre diameter size should work according to this website. That's assuming, of course, that your place is not on the north-facing slope of a steep hill where you have no view of the satellite!

Al