...and out went all the lights!

[venta]

I just lifted the iron down from the shelf, and found its base was covered in rust. I cleaned it off with a brillo pad, but fear I might have got some water in the works because plugging it in shorted out the power for the entire house. Twice.

hendybear, maybe we shouldn't have used the iron to defrost the freezer after all.

Comments

[huskyteer.livejournal.com]

Shame - defrosting the freezer with an iron is a brilliant idea.

[venta.livejournal.com]

It works really, really well - took us about ten minutes or so to get thick ice off all sides of a chest freezer.

(This was a steam iron, I don't know if a normal iron would do such a good job.)

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

Maybe next time dry it off afterwards?

More helpfully, put a 5-amp fuse in its plug, or the plug of any successor iron - you don't really want the house fuses to be blowing when an appliance shorts! I guess the thing about the cobbler's children also applies to the tenants of electrical-engineer landlords...

[venta.livejournal.com]

I thought we had dried it off!

Wouldn't an iron need more than a 5A fuse ? Also, we have the popping kind of fuse in our house, so blowing isn't so serious!

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

5A is plenty, it would be a pretty exciting kind of iron which was more than 1200W. (Quick search turns up this in support.)

Glad to hear you didn't have to fiddle around with fuse wire, at least!

[onebyone.livejournal.com]

Unless it's shorting to earth, or course, in which case you very much want an RCD to go, rather than hanging around waiting for some stupid bit of fuse wire to melt.

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

Good point, I wasn't thinking of that! -- but fortunately changing the iron's own fuse from 13A to 5A shouldn't affect that scenario adversely.

[feanelwa.livejournal.com]

A normal iron would not fill itself full of ice and then go rusty, if it didn't have steam bits on the inside.

Leave it outside in the sun! (What sun. Put it in the airing cupboard.)

[venta.livejournal.com]

What airing cupboard!

It definitely wasn't full of ice. I'm leaving it to dry out, though, in the hopes it'll work again.