Dad burn it!! - Day 2

I am a dad. It burned. ‘It’ was a voltage stabilizer.

I returned home late this morning to a smell that scares me every time I smell it. Burning electrical something or another. No smoke. No active noises or signs of ongoing burnage, just the lingering funk from a very recent electrical burn. It was one of those sting your eyes, can’t possibly be good to be breathing this stuff sort of smells.

And so I began my hunt for the recently deceased electrical device, which those of you who have seen our office at home know could take me days to find. Since the power was off (in the whole neighborhood, not as a result of the burnage), which happens all the time here, this could be interesting. All the while, the question keeps running through my head – is there something still burning?

About two months ago we had an inverter installed in our house which stores power in two truck batteries and then supplies power to almost the whole house when the main power goes off. A very cool thing indeed, which has made our lives a lot better. So, due to the inverter, most things in the office were still powered on.

I began by searching for devices that should be on (powered by the inverter) but were not. I found two. My wife’s lcd monitor for her computer, and the fax machine. The fax machine is old and would be no great loss. The monitor would hurt a bit more. Then I realized that both devices were plugged into one single point, the above mentioned voltage stabilizer.

We bought that stabilizer almost 10 years ago now, when we first moved here. Power fluctuations were extreme then, and one dared not plug much of anything in unless it was through a voltage stabilizer. It has served us well. However, it will not be serving us any longer.

As soon as I picked up the stabilizer I knew this was the source of the smell. It was too hot to hold in my hand, and reeked of the same smell as the whole room, only much, much stronger. I removed the cover and confirmed its status. Totally hopeless. The main coil inside had literally melted and several key wires had burned significantly.

We are actually lucky it did not do more than fizzle out within itself. It was sitting behind my wife’s desk, among a whole pile of other cords, wires and cables. A bad thing indeed had it ignited back there.

In happier news, an update on my fingers from yesterday – they have experienced remarkable healing in the last 24 hours. One of them still hurts, but not too bad.

My hope now is that there is not a need for a “Dad burn it!! – Day 3” to add to this series. We can not afford to burn anything else.