The wiring might just need a little work, too!

Is there any?
Sad thing is thgis old house will probably either get torn dorn or "renovated" beyond recognition.
I really like exploring such ruins, had my share of that during many summers in Italy.

I was kidding about the wiring. The realtor's description says "Electricity promised nearby soon!"

If you like these sort of old ruins... Er, I mean "historic olde worlde homes" , you'll find plenty at the site I lifted this photo from:

www.gvp.ie

Gees Paul!,
Would it even be worth it to renovate a house in this condition?.
Looks like it's got mould and mildew for miles.
How old would this house be?.

Yeah, it looks pretty bad! If you want to see the agent's description on the above link, it's the property at BALLYKELLY, BROADFORD, CO. CLARE, priced at €36,825 !

I'm sure DJK will confirm that you'll find derelict places like this all over the west of Ireland.

You're paying for the site really. It's next to impossible to get planning permission to build anything new in rural ireland thesedays so it's quite a viable option to buy something like that keep the shell and turn it into something cool and modern while retaining the original character. You may not get permission to demolish it. It might have to be restored. Quite unlikely to disappear.

Many of those old houses were abandoned during the 19th century (great famine population went from circa 7 million to 2.3 million!) you get complete ghost towns in the west of Ireland where everyone either emmigrated or died.

The more recent (20th century) houses would be abandoned farm houses where people either left the countryside many years ago and farms were consolidated into larger holdings or where people left during the economic crisis in the 1920s-1950s and just never returned and leased out their farms to ajoining farmers on a long term basis.

These derelect properties are suddenly extremely valuable. So they're hitting the market.

The house above looks like it was prob. abandoned in the 1930s/40s.

A lot of these properties would never have had electricity as they were abandoned way before rural electrification.

Getting connected up in a rural area isn't a huge deal here though. There are various state and county council schemes to share the cost. You pay part of it, the ESB absorbs part of it and the state absorbs the rest.

If you're with in sight of a 10,20 or 38kV distribution line you can be hooked up very quickly, just a pole top transformer and a run of cable.

In other circumstances where you're a little further away a LV line at 230/400V would link you into your pole top xformer where ever the nearest line was.

Or, worst case scenario, they have to run a medium voltage spur line out to near your proprty. This is where it gets pricy!

---

Phone service could be provided with a physical connection to a copper cable if you're within reach of a main road where those cable bundles run or if you're too far away a 2-way digital microwave link ties you into the local ericsson AXE or (mostly) alcatel E10-(B3) switch.. weird system that either gives you a POTS(PSTN) or ISDN line. Analogue microwave systems were used in the 70s and 80s in places.

Ireland has a very low density population (the lowest in the EU). It's shown by the ratio of switches to people. 3.7 million people are served by over 1500 digital exchanges! (depending on how you classify an "exchange") Making the average local exchange quite small.

For net access: you'd be stuck with dial up or ISDN .. Wireless broadband in rural areas is starting to roll out bit by bit. A new state-aided package to encourage rural development is starting too. DSL would be a bit too far away!

TV: RTE, Network 2, TV3 and TG4 via good ole UHF/VHF (PAL I 625 line with nicam stereo).
or Digital TV broadcast at around 2.3 Ghz(aprox 100 channels including UK terrestrial).
Or of course Sky Digital (Digital Satellite) which in Ireland carries RTE, Network 2, TV3, TG4 and rte digital and radio services.. but only BBC NI 1+2.. no ITV or C4. along with about 400 other channels.

[This message has been edited by djk (edited 11-16-2003).]

djk,
Thanks for that explain!.
I know what you mean about the price of MV Spur Lines.
Some city dwellers over here, that move out to the country, have an irritating habit of building thier new house as far off the road passing thier property as possible.
And then moan about the cost of the Spur line.
The Lines Companies used to charge for lines, from the Secondary side of the Xformer, usually only charging for the Service Line to the house.
In the world of User-Pays, these days, you pay from the load side of the MV drop-out fuses, poles, lines, insulators, everything, even the work crews cup of tea!.
Just a small aside, is Wireless Internet used that much in the rural parts of the UK?.
We will be waiting ages over here, before we ever get it, Auckland's got it though(like everything else:rolleyes .

I honestly can't see the point of trying to restore something this bad. It would be easier, and in the long run probably cheaper, to just build from scratch.

Still, if the local council say no, then I suppose there's little alternative, but on something like this with an acre of land, I don't see what the objection would be.

In my not-so-humble opinion, it's our local councils who are to blame for preventing people from setting themselves up with affordable accommodation. Just try getting permission to site a double-wide on your own lot here! (*)

As you say, the price is really just the site, and although I'd consider $40,000 to be excessive for an acre of land, it's still a better deal than England. You can get agricultural land cheaper here, but not anywhere that the council would let you build on. In fact in many areas you'll see small lots of 1/8 acre or less going for that amount. In some areas it would be double that. Prices have gotten silly.

I'm not aware of any wireless internet services covering my area at the moment. This part of Norfolk has a much lower population density than average, but it's still more settled than the west of Ireland or probably most of rural NZ.

Some of the city types who come up here for a week on the Broads (inland waterways) grumble if they hit a patch where their cellphone doesn't work! Locals just accept it.

On power distribution, I don't have a map of the network, but there are 132kV transmission lines coming into Great Yarmouth, about 20 miles south. Yarmouth is a fairly big, sprawling seaside resort and industrial town (and not very pleasant -- avoid if possible!).

33kV lines run out along the main highway to Stalham, population approx. 3000, about 5 miles from here. From there the only HV around the immediate area is local 11kV distribution.

Phone service is provided by small switches, which would have been UAX (Unit Automatic eXchange) SxS types originally, now digital.

My local C.O. is Stalham, which serves a radius of about 5 miles. Numbers are in the 580xxx to 584xxx range, which gives an idea of how many subscribers there are.

Adjacent offices serve fewer lines: Smallburgh has only 535xxx and 536xxx, for example, and in the other direction Hickling has only 598xxx.

(*) P.S. What's it like to get a permit for siting a mobile home in Ireland and NZ ?


[This message has been edited by pauluk (edited 11-17-2003).]

Paul,

Prices here are extremely high and that would prob. represent good value. You'd also find that most people buying that sort of thing would spent at least another 100,000 on doing-it-up.

As for the WiFi thing. There's a rather innovative state funded push to get DSL equivlants rolled out in rural areas. For example, parts of rural West Cork now have very high speed broadband provided via a hybrid infrastructure of fiber for backhaul and radio technologies feeding individual customers. The advent of cheap broadband in urban areas meant that rural businesses were put at a huge disadvantage.

Our rural phone network pretty much skipped analogue/spatial switching technologies completely and went directly from manual to E10 and AXE digital systems (1979-1985ish) so the numbering system doesn't really have a very tight structure below the area code level. There are very structured area codes but the 5-digit numbers had little or no geographical signifigance. 51111 and 78999 could be in the same building. In the past few years they've been merging the area codes and moving to 7-digit numbering. All you can really identify from the number is the parent switch most of which handle all of the local exchanges in a whole region and even that's getting difficult to identify. Phone numbers are becoming much more like IP addresses all the time.

If you're intrested, here's the other switch family used here & unheard of in the UK: http://www.alcatel.com/products/pro...pgproduct/Alcatel_1000_E10_CENTREX.jhtml


[This message has been edited by djk (edited 11-17-2003).]

djk, in your 11-16-2003 08:44 PM post, semi-rural ISDN in mentioned. Aside from regional regulatory issues, in the western US there is an unswitched or “nailed-up” version of ISDN data service called IDSL, that has rock-steady symmetrical 144kb/sec data, {from what we call “Basic-Rate Interface” here…64+64+16kb/sec on 2B+D service} up to an 18 000 ft loop from the switch, or 36 000 ft with a currently no-extra-charge repeater midspan. It’s pricey in NorCal and western Washington state at $104 a month, and borders on {as far as I can get out of a sales droid} the equivalent of a Virtual Private Network circuit to [SBC] Pacific Bell or Qwest captive ISP. It is apparently a ‘low-speed’ symmetrical digital subscriber loop (SDSL) on an single copper pair, but not subject to the variabilities of the typical analog dialup. Have you heard of anything like that rumoured in your area? Around here, it looks like it is the only near-term gap-filler between "56kb/sec" {ha!} dialup and 384/128kb/s ADSL over the PSTN or cablemodem.

Aside — An associate tried out geostationary-satellite internet through Gilat/Starband available on the main North American continent, {at ~$70/month} but with the 2 X 33,000-mile path, the latency was agonizing. The local roof-mounted ~½x1-meter “dish” actually has a real 1-watt Ku-band transmitter(!)




[This message has been edited by Bjarney (edited 11-18-2003).]

I presume normal ISDN in the US is charged at a different rate to normal phone calls ?

Here in Ireland ISDN and normal analogue calls are charged at the same rates regardless of wheather they're voice or data.( You pay slightly less than the rental for 2 analogue lines for a BRA ISDN line.)
This means that if you subscribe to a flat rate internet dial-up package (either full flat rate or a fixed number of hours per month) that you have the choice of using 56K or ISDN (at up to 128K depending on the package).

So, with an ISDN line you can get reasonably fast flat rate internet access and phone service down the same line. Generally as ISDN connections only take about 1-2 seconds to establish it's pretty much as good as always on.

The interface consists of a box on the wall with 2 RJ11 ports for analogue phones (behaves just like 2 normal phone lines) and 2 RJ45 ports for digital services (computers or phones).

You can use up to 128K of bandwidth i.e.
2 simultanious phone calls
1 phone call + 64kbps data
or 128kbps data no phone calls. This can be configured so that if a phone rings or someone picks up a phone your data connection drops back to 64Kbps or it can just diver the call to voicemail.

The newer interface boxes even contain a USB port for directly connecting to a PC or Mac without any terminal adaptor.

By default you get 2 phone numbers (with two seperate voicemail boxes) You can assign these to either analogue port or use them for digital stuff.

There are also some nifty features like if someone calls on one of your lines you can transfer them to the other etc.. They also support all of the usual features that you'd find on a phone line (caller ID, call waiting, call return, divertion etc etc.. via the analogue ports or via the digital ports)

Or if you buy a ISDN compatable DECT (Cordless phone) or small PABX unit (typically under €400) you can do a lot of things including buying more numbers to use for Direct inward dialling giving each extension on the PABX its own number for inward calls even though you only have 1 real ISDN line.


There hasn't been that much call for non-switched ISDN (yet). Eircom do provide it but it would be classified as an ISDN leased line and would be ridiculously pricy.

While ISDN is widely available I wouldn't go as far as to say that it's universally available. In some instances the distance to the switch is just too great.

[This message has been edited by djk (edited 11-18-2003).]