[paganel]

Of course it is false but the regime was definitely monitoring private power consumption (I'm also from Romania).

My dad told me relatively recently how sometime during a winter from the late '80s a lady from the power company showed up at our apartment's door and told my father that we should lower our energy consumption, i.e. not use an electrical heater to, well, heat the house. That would have course meant having a freezing house, which wasn't ideal for kid me, so my dad, logically, called that lady some names and invited her inside the apartment to share the bed with all of us (because of the cold I was sleeping as a kid between my parents during the winter, we couldn't physically heat two rooms at the same time). Interesting times.

Bonus points for us, kids, booing and swearing out loud when the power was being cut off in the evening, and cheering when it was being restored, like true "freedom" fighters against the regime (I'm talking about the summer months when we were all outside to play well into the evening/dark hours).

[gls2ro]

So what is false from that expression in the article?

That the access to electricity was limited?

You are saying

> "the power was being cut off in the evening"

How is not the power limited if this was happening? :)

[paganel]

It's false because they weren't explicitly "prohibiting" refrigerator and vacuum cleaner use per se (as the article says), no need to do that, just cutting the power off completely was enough to do the trick.

But, yeah, on a more general level whoever was designing any electrical-related stuff had to have that in mind (the power cuts and the reduced power consumption asked from us, that is).

This discussion also reminded me that, as a kid, I was really in awe in how the (analogue) telephone network was still working even when the power went out, it seemed like magic. There was an article posted yesterday here on HN about how we're expecting rolling black-outs in our mobile phone network over parts of Europe, goes to show that in some ways the system back then that we had in Romania was a lot more resilient in face of power-cuts compared to what we have now available over most of Europe.