Breathe
Friday March 15th 2019, 10:38 pm
Filed under: Family,Life

So here’s what happened: I walked out of the room to get ready for bed two nights ago, expecting him to follow in a moment or two; instead, he called out for me to come back about five minutes later, and as I turned from the hallway into the family room it hit me, too. The sharp smell of burning plastic. It happened that fast.

We unplugged everything around and including the computers, since it seemed to come from that part of the room, and stayed up way late sniffing and looking and touching and trying to track down the source, with fans blowing to clear it out. Which two things kind of defeated each other but. We would step out of the room or outside to refresh our noses and try again. I wished out loud for a trained dog, and we kind of laughed over what our lovable but not overly bright St. Bernard/Mastiff granddog would do. I wondered if we were supposed to call the fire department–but there was no fire for them to come to, yet, anyway, and nothing had a power source anymore.

Last night we plugged in the surge protector and the computers again and gave them a try. Seemed okay. We did not leave them on for the night but at least I got my blog post done in that short time.

With slightly more confidence in those, my computer came back on in the morning, and the idea was that we would plug one new thing at a time back in to try to figure out what was going bad.

I think we’ve found it. The smell was faint but the heat from the thing was not. I’ll feel better when we’ve tested everything but I think that ACDC adaptor was it. If anyone has any words of wisdom on the subject please fill me in.

That whole thing was just really, really close. The smoke alarms (Wikipedia link) did not go off. What if he’d left the room when I did.


2 Comments so far
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I am glad you are OK! It is a good idea to call the fire department when this happens. We had a halogen lamp do this –more than ten years ago–and the firefighters figured it all out for us before things got out of hand. An electrical fire in the wall is also the kind of thing you would never catch and would also smell this way. You can explain that you do not think this is an emergency but still get the firefighters’ opinion on this stuff. Call them at your leisure. So glad you are ok!

Comment by Joanne 03.16.19 @ 4:31 pm

Wow! As one of my friends likes to say, Scary Monsters! I’m so glad things worked out the way they did.

Comment by ccr in MA 03.17.19 @ 9:50 am



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