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.

Laundry Days

In our apartment is this tiny little washer and we don't have a dryer. Aside from the fact that it takes two loads to do a week's worth of clothing, it wasn't that bad trying to get laundry done, especially in the summer. It was really, really hot and it took only a few hours and maybe a whole day to dry everything off. It also helped being able to use our mirpeset (balcony) to dry everything off.

Since it has gotten colder, we've been using our drying rack inside our apartment. When it was really cold we had our heater on. I liked to put it near the drying rack to try to speed up the process. The problem that I didn't realize was that we still had all of our windows in the apartment closed at all times. I couldn't quite figure out why our towels and jeans took nearly forever to dry off. It just didn't makes sense.



I did notice a musty feel in the apartment and that some of my books started to warp. It really hit me when Kaitlin and I got back from Sinai. We decided to try something new. Instead of leaving the apartment sealed up, we decided to open the windows and keep the heaters running. I'm sure it runs a little more electricity, but I've noticed that it only takes a day or two to dry everything off.

It works so much better now and it only takes each of us a day or so to deal with al of our laundry opposed to having something drying every single day.

Woohoo!