We Needed More Power

Some background - we're two people in a large apartment intended for four to six people, at least a family with kids, possibly grandparents in tow. There is a spot marked off for a washing machine. There are places to install four large electric heating / cooling units (known here as "aircon" units) but only three are installed. There is no other installed source of heating or cooling. Therefore, you would think that running two of the heating units plus the washing machine and, say, a Japanese electric oven (the only kind you can get), would not trip the circuit breakers of the apartment and plunge everything into darkness, wouldn't you?

The item previously known as the Box of Inadequacy

Well, no, apparently not. We had a 50 amp main breaker, which was semi-regularly not sufficient for our electric needs. I think there is a good chance that if you actually turned on four heating/cooling units at the same time, as the apartment should have been designed for, that it might trip the breaker right there. Also, Japanese people tend to have fewer and less powerful computers than us, but it seems obvious that the peak available power of the apartment could be easily exceeded by a family of six who all happened to be home and doing something at the same time. I bought a backup power unit to shield my computers from this unreliability and also to condition the power to them, but it was getting pretty annoying to lose power (halfway through a movie while eating dinner the lights and heat go out, the oven shuts off and loses the timer for baking cookies, all the computers die, and the washing machine forgets where in the cycle it was, etc) so we decided to find out if we could choke up to a power connection that might actually, you know, supply us with power.

As we've probably said before, there are two speeds in Japan. Something either happens instantly or else takes at least a couple of months. To our pleasure and surprise, getting more power is one of the things that happens instantly. We had our helper from the school call the realty agency, and the next afternoon they came over to have a look at our circuit breaker to make sure we weren't just using it wrong or something. They don't believe anything we say until they see it for themselves - the default position seems to be that the foreigners are both crazy and incompetent, see for example when we told them there were mice in the ceiling and they seemed genuinely surprised to in fact find mice in the ceiling. Anyhow, after verifying the box was not defective or being improperly used, they called the power company who came the next afternoon and installed the biggest main breaker that they can give a private residence: a whopping 60 amps. Ye-haw.

Now upgraded to Box of Extreme Power (that's Medium Power in non-Metric units)

So far, the upgrade has been sufficient to stop the blackouts. I guess we were right on the edge and the extra 20% covers our needs, but I'm pretty sure they run 100+ amps to even small houses in the States, and we have most all the equipment of a house in here, plus electric heat. So far their "big-u size" breaker has been good enough, though, and for the extra $2 a month they're putting on the electric bill for a while to pay for it, it was a worthwhile upgrade.