The Warm Box

Ohmri and I where down in Morzine this weekend and took the fridge and oven down with us. The plan was to see how much of the kitchen I could get built now that the tiles were in. But first I would have to finish the electrics for the lights and plugs, skin the walls and then start the actual build of the units.

Rob was down with his family for their half term and he helped put the kitchen walls up and wire up the lights and plugs. Then we started assembling the kitchen units that fit along the back wall. Once the carcasses were fitted and screwed to the wall we started to fit the fridge, microwave and oven. The fridge and microwave have Swiss plugs on them and I did not have any French plugs but the oven just needed to wired directly to the wall. We wired it up and as we did noticed that the oven said 400 Volts. This is weird. Rob and I expected 240 volts. 400 is just really hard to get, especially when the plugs lights etc are all 240. Well we tried it and I can confirm that a 400 Volt oven is just a warm box when you try it with 240.

It was bit disappointing and I will have take the oven back to Ikea although it will provide Rob with hours of entertainment, teasing me about how many volts an oven has, I have looked and they do actually say it is a 400 volt oven in the web page. Strangely, you can buy the exact same model in the French Ikea which is 240 volts! Stranger too is that the swiss oven coats 599 swiss francs and the French oven costs 525 Euros! Nearly 800 swiss francs. Apparently swiss ovens all are 400 volts and they do something clever with 2 or 3 phase electricity to get 400 volts, but it must be complicated and why bother when you are providing 240 to lights and plugs anyhow? Seems weird. Well a couple of friends here have confirmed it and the oven in my apartment is actually 400 volts as well, but I still have no idea how to get 400 from 3 240 phases. I could perhaps do the same thing as I have three phase power in the chalet but I have to get the electrics signed of by the EDF and I don't want to have to explain anything out of the ordinary. I just want it simple, so I will replace the 400 volt oven with a 240 volt oven (not quite sure where from yet) and use that one.

Any way the kitchen is looking good apart from the oven, loads to do still but it looks good.