Another Unwanted Adventure

This morning I got up and wandered about lazily just like I do every Saturday until I feel like starting my chores.  It's nice not to have to just jolt out of bed, run around the house like some crazy thing and immediately go to work.

Then I smelled a burning plastic smell. This is pretty unusual...as in I've never smelled that inside the house before.  So I lurk around our bedroom where the smell is stronger, touch the walls, feel the outlet where the air conditioner is running...mildly warm...air conditioner cords are usually mildly warm, just like vacuum cleaner cords. I go into the rabbit room...and...there/s smoke...and the smell is atrocious.

Jon and I think its the ceiling fan, so we immediately cut the power to it.  I go outside to get the bunny box so he can be evacuated into not noxious fumes...and there is still oodles of smoke. Jon notices an outlet is glowing red...the outlets in that room are not used because bunnies like to eat cords and pulls the main switch.

Neither of us really know what to do, we just sit in the house, windows open, with the power off and kind of stare at each other.  What if we'd gone somewhere? What if we'd been at work?  We'd have come home to no house and crispy or missing critters.

Jon finally called his dad who got him his Uncle Wally's phone number. Wally, blessedly, is a semi-retired electrician.  We had let the outlet cool, took it apart, and phoned him to tell him what we found. He didn't like the sound of it so he drove an hour to our house to take a peek.

Wally inspected things, trimmed some wired, and wired it all back up, thinking that because we have old style metal boxes in the wall (original in 1949) one of the wires on the outlet was arcing and just got really hot against the box and started the fire.

Of course we don't have a breaker box; we have an old style fuse box with 15 amp fuses in it...which is actually the correct size fuse. The mystery here is why didn't the fuse pop?  We asked Wally and he said he hates old school fuses for this reason, most of the time the do pop...and then, there's times like this where they just don't.  So of course we asked him how much it would cost to install a breaker box...he said around $400...but that it would be awhile. He works for people part time because of the government being all worried about him working full time and being retired....our government is just dumb..so he said probably October he could swing it.

He suggested we tear apart ALL the outlets, make sure the connections were secure, and that there was electrical tape insulating the outside of the outlet OVER the connections just so it couldn't possibly arc to the metal wall boxes.  I didn't think we had 20 outlets in the house, but guess what, we do.  Went over every single one...two people...four hours...but we had quite a scare.