I'm awesome. Or awful. I forget which.
Last night after dinner, I was enjoying having the house to myself. I had Law and Order on the TV, I was working on some crafts, and a load of dishes was going in the dishwasher while some laundry was finishing up in the drier.
I started to smell something funny in the house. Not "ew, perfume" funny, but that melty smell associated in my mind with overheating electronics. D's computer has been on the fritz lately (off and on), so after about 10 minutes I put my crafts down and ambled over to give it a sniff. Turns out, his computer was off (along with the power strip leading to it). So I then checked the TV/gaming consoles area, my own computer, the humidifier, and the washer/drier areas. Nothing smelled like burnt wiring, so I sat back down & went back to what I was doing. After another while with the smell getting continuously stronger, I made the circuit again, this time also checking the fridge & dishwasher & the hallway outside our door. The smell wasn't coming from the hallway. In front of the fridge, it smelled. In front of the dishwasher it didn't. But I did mentally register that the dishwasher was (by now) on the heat cycle to dry things, so after inspecting the fridge & finding nothing, I shut the dishwasher off & opened the door.
Turns out my plastic spoonrest had slipped through the bottom rack in the dishwasher & was touching the heating element which is responsible for drying the dishes. Also turns out that element gets pretty goddamn hot, since the "heat resistant to 400 F" spoonrest now has about a 2 inch gash melted into it. The heating element was slowly slicing through the spoonrest like cold butter perched across a hot knife blade. Really goddamn stinky cold butter. I let it all cool off last night--tonight I get to see if I can peel any of that formerly-molten plastic off that thing before we need to use the dishwasher again. Yum!
I started to smell something funny in the house. Not "ew, perfume" funny, but that melty smell associated in my mind with overheating electronics. D's computer has been on the fritz lately (off and on), so after about 10 minutes I put my crafts down and ambled over to give it a sniff. Turns out, his computer was off (along with the power strip leading to it). So I then checked the TV/gaming consoles area, my own computer, the humidifier, and the washer/drier areas. Nothing smelled like burnt wiring, so I sat back down & went back to what I was doing. After another while with the smell getting continuously stronger, I made the circuit again, this time also checking the fridge & dishwasher & the hallway outside our door. The smell wasn't coming from the hallway. In front of the fridge, it smelled. In front of the dishwasher it didn't. But I did mentally register that the dishwasher was (by now) on the heat cycle to dry things, so after inspecting the fridge & finding nothing, I shut the dishwasher off & opened the door.
Turns out my plastic spoonrest had slipped through the bottom rack in the dishwasher & was touching the heating element which is responsible for drying the dishes. Also turns out that element gets pretty goddamn hot, since the "heat resistant to 400 F" spoonrest now has about a 2 inch gash melted into it. The heating element was slowly slicing through the spoonrest like cold butter perched across a hot knife blade. Really goddamn stinky cold butter. I let it all cool off last night--tonight I get to see if I can peel any of that formerly-molten plastic off that thing before we need to use the dishwasher again. Yum!