Bright Idea

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No, I didn’t see a long tunnel with a light at the end, but I did have soot on my hands from the flash.  I’m no electrician and the ordering instructions weren’t clear about how to get the dryer installed, as well as delivered.  The driver, who spoke English haltingly, told me he would not set it up.  There was another problem with the order: the dryer cord was for a four-pronged outlet, but our house has a three.  I suppose that’s why the cord doesn’t get attached to the appliance.  Now, we lived in Scotland for three years.  Electronic devices there are sold with a cord that you have to wire into the plug yourself—different places have different outlet types.  With fear and trembling I’d wired a lamp or two.  I prefer not to play God when it comes to electricity.

I don’t know how many appliance-related deaths happen each year, but I’m sure it’s not a null set.  Here’s what happened.  A week after delivery I found time to go to the hardware store to exchange the four-prong for a three-prong.  I went home and wired it up.  The plug didn’t fit into the socket.  Muttering under my breath, I turned to the internet to find out what had gone wrong.  Well, it turns out that electric kitchen ranges are also not wired sometimes, and they take a different three-prong plug with wires handling different voltages or whatever.  Yet another weekend came and I finally got the right cord.  A little insecure from the two attempted efforts, I put the plug in the socket to see if it fit.  A bright spark and a loud pop occurred.  Two of the connectors had been touching and I’d closed the circuit.  If I’d been holding it differently, I wouldn’t have survived the experience.

As a child I once electrocuted myself, quite by accident, it is an experience I never wanted to have again.  I was so shook up after being so close to it again that I couldn’t face going back to the store to see if they had another one—the cord was now soot-blackened, and useless.  Living in a capitalist society my mind immediately turned to my electric bill, wondering how much that light and sound show would cost me.  The dryer is energy-efficient, all the more so for not having ever been used up to that point.  Now we’re hooked up and ready to go and I’m thinking how fragile life is.  And how, in middle and high school we had to have wood shop and metal shop but not a thing about that favorite tool of the gods—electricity.

Heat Pump

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We’re preparing our home to welcome a new resident.  It’s not human.  Those of you who are home owners know how you move from crisis to crisis, paying to repair this just in time to start paying for that.  Our current issue is a dead dryer.  We knew it wasn’t long for this world when we moved in.  The previous owners, as most working class folk do, let things go until a machine forces  the issue by dying.  Being concerned for the environment, we like to replace appliances with more environmentally friendly ones, if we can.  They are, of course, much more expensive.  With the dryer it was also a space issue.  Snuggled together like young lovers in bed, the washer and dryer leave less than an inch clearance total from either wall.  The first issue we faced—modern dryers are bigger.

Small and energy efficient is what we wanted.  I learned about heat-pump dryers.  They don’t require a vent and they’ve been used for decades in Europe because of both space issues and environmental friendliness.  Here they cost more and you’ll have to wait because they’re in demand.  We decided to side with the environment.  Then there’s the problem of the old vent.  I gingerly walked out the old dryer and was amazed at the detritus I found.  Now, I’m an archaeologist at heart, so instead of sweeping it all in the trash, I sorted through it.  I found a dollar bill.  And 32 cents—this helps defray the cost of the new dryer.  Three guitar picks and a heap of cosmetics.  A box of rubber bands for braces.  There was ancient history in this pile!  The lighting’s bad in that corner so I put on a headlamp like a phylactery.  Let there be light.

I had to use most of my tools to tug the old vent out.  You have to stuff the hole with insulation and put some furring strips in place to hold the new drywall.  Cut out the patch to fit the hole and mud the whole thing up.  Why bother painting where nobody will see?  By the end of the weekend we were ready for our new resident.  It still wouldn’t be here for at least a couple of weeks.  The clothesline is strung in the backyard where the even better method of using nature’s dryer is free.  For those days without sun and on which we have time to do a load, we’ll be glad for our heat-pump dryer.  Particularly when the weather starts growing cold again and global warming enacts its chaos.  Hopefully we’ll have a stop-gap solution by then.

Fire and Ice

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Most people in our modern world consider a cooking device an important part of a household.  Many of us are also over-committed.  These two elements came together last week when our kitchen stove (“range,” I’m finding out, is the correct term) burned out.  We could tell when we bought our house two years ago that the previous owners had likely not replaced any appliances.  The refrigerator died our first year.  Now, in our second, the stove—excuse me, range—went.  Given that it’s turned cooler around here, a good hot meal in the evening has been a welcome relief, but with no stove how do you cook it?  This happened on a Tuesday.  My wife and I compared calendars.  The closest evening we could both get out to look for replacements was Friday.  Of course, once you shell out the money you also have to wait for delivery and installation.  It looked like at least a week without home-cooked food.  Grocery shopping, of course, had been on Monday.

It occurred to me how utterly dependent we are on our big appliances.  The refrigerator died just before a holiday weekend in pre-covid days, so we were on our way out of town when it happened.  A lot of food had to be wasted.  It took about four days before a new one could be delivered, and we had to cut short our trip to be here in time for the installers.  Food.  Unless you’re living on granola bars and trail mix you need to keep it cold or keep it hot.  Our ranges and refrigerators do the heavy lifting for us.  Our ancestors stuck things in the cellar to keep cool and chopped wood to keep what is properly called a “stove” hot in the kitchen.  It was pretty much a full-time job just to survive.  Now nightly Zoom meetings make any interruption of online connectivity difficult.

Weekends, given the circumstances, are gems.  They are the only time we can get things done.  Days are eaten up by ever-expanding work by people desperate to keep their jobs in a tanking economy.  Supply chains, interrupted by the virus, meant that a delivery of a new range would only happen in January.  Going without food until the new year steered us toward a DIY appliance repair solution.  I never thought I’d be sticking my head in an oven, but here I was, with a new part ordered from Amazon and the confidence of the friendly people on YouTube telling me I could do it.  Taking days instead of months, we were cooking again by Sunday, and I just might’ve learned something along the way.