(no subject)
Aug. 24th, 2002 10:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cellioWe've got gremlins.
Remember, a few weeks ago, when I wrote that my reading lamp had "exploded" without warning on Shabbat? Hold that thought.
Our house is very nice, but it does have the occasional "what were they thinking?" feature. One such is the lamp built into the newel post at the bottom of the steps (on the main floor). Someone actually drilled a hole through the post in order to run a wire to a lamp that was (theoretically) screwed onto the top of said post. (The screws were long gone by the time we bought the house.) I've never been able to find the other end of this wire, by the way; the basement is confusing.
The lamp is kind of goofy and a little ugly, but we can't replace it without splicing (or tracing) that wire. And if we just plain remove it, we have a visible hole in the post. So we've pretty much ignored it, because that's the path of least resistance. But it is a convenient light to leave on for Shabbat (it uses a night-light bulb, 4 watts I think), which is the only time we turn it on.
Last night, a second or two after I turned it on, it caught fire and (I presume) shorted out. It was a small fire (flames were probably under a foot) and it burned itself out before I got to the fire extinguisher. But this lamp had never done anything particularly weird before. I have no idea what caused this.
What the heck has gotten into our wiring?
I want an electrician to come in and look things over, though I don't really know what he could do besides look at the breaker box and say "yup, you have wires, connected ones even".
Remember, a few weeks ago, when I wrote that my reading lamp had "exploded" without warning on Shabbat? Hold that thought.
Our house is very nice, but it does have the occasional "what were they thinking?" feature. One such is the lamp built into the newel post at the bottom of the steps (on the main floor). Someone actually drilled a hole through the post in order to run a wire to a lamp that was (theoretically) screwed onto the top of said post. (The screws were long gone by the time we bought the house.) I've never been able to find the other end of this wire, by the way; the basement is confusing.
The lamp is kind of goofy and a little ugly, but we can't replace it without splicing (or tracing) that wire. And if we just plain remove it, we have a visible hole in the post. So we've pretty much ignored it, because that's the path of least resistance. But it is a convenient light to leave on for Shabbat (it uses a night-light bulb, 4 watts I think), which is the only time we turn it on.
Last night, a second or two after I turned it on, it caught fire and (I presume) shorted out. It was a small fire (flames were probably under a foot) and it burned itself out before I got to the fire extinguisher. But this lamp had never done anything particularly weird before. I have no idea what caused this.
What the heck has gotten into our wiring?
I want an electrician to come in and look things over, though I don't really know what he could do besides look at the breaker box and say "yup, you have wires, connected ones even".
What they said
Date: 2002-08-25 03:44 pm (UTC)