Today, I met with the Supervisor of the Power Company because he is helping me complete all of the paperwork I need in order to get electricity hooked up at the house. At the moment, we have the poles in, the pedestal is hooked up and run to the house leaving us with just one thing left; the meter.
Unfortunately, we found out today that we are going to have a few more roadblocks. The first one is that they won’t grant us electricity until we have our Permiso de Uso from ARPE which is a couple months down the line. We may be able to get around that with a construction line, which costs more to run but will still get us power. The second thing is a bit more difficult to deal with. When the supervisor read the “electrical inspection certification number” to the Electric Company, they told him that they don’t have any record of that number and that it doesn’t exist. This means that we were either ripped off and sold a forged electrical certification or the paperwork hasn’t made it into the system yet (but it has been 8 weeks, so that is doubtful).
I am going to have to grease many more palms to get this done, because the only way another electrician will give us our certification is if he/she see’s the wiring…which is now behind $12,000 worth of greenboard, mud and paint. Theoretically, they could make us rip the walls down to inspect the lines. I have my fingers crossed we are going to work through this without that debilitating expense.