Electricity

Last week I needed to do some laundry. It was time. My roommate was home and watching a movie with one of her friends on her computer. My computer was plugged in to the wall, and my heater was warming my room. She turned on the heater in the large room so they could be warm too. Yes the internet was working, which involves three plugs.

I didn't think it would be a problem, but as soon as I turned on the laundry machine the fuse flipped. I went through the apartment unplugging things we weren't using, even the fridge was unplugged. Nothing was helping. After a few minutes I gave up on getting laundry done until later. But when we turned off just about everything we still couldn't turn on the laundry machine. So I started to search the entire apartment for something that could be a problem.

I found it! One of the outlets had an extension chording coming out of it that had four ports. Plugged into that was a two-meter extension chord that had five sockets. But that's not all. Plugged into one of those was another extension chord that had five more sockets that had the three internet pieces, the heater and the computer plugged into them.

Now before you go off the handle and tell me that we shouldn't have done that, we didn't. This was set up in the apartment before we got here, and didn't change anything in that room. This was all done by someone else and we just went along with it because I hadn't looked behind our bookshelf. I cannot believe how unsafe that was. It really blew my mind that I hadn't found it in the last seven months of living here.

We still cannot use two heaters and the water heater or the kum-kum (electric tea-kettle) at the same time. But I have noticed that we aren't taxing one socket as much. I also made some changes in my bedroom, trying to get some of the load off a single fuse. Here's to hoping we don't set the building on fire.