Appliance malfunction: here's a new one

[Jenise]

So I was laying in bed tonight and from downstairs I could hear one of the garbage disposals in the kitchen start grinding. Strange, I thought to myself, I thought Bob was in the bathroom. So I turned to my left and indeed the bathroom door was shut, light on. "Bob?" Yup, he was in there.

The garbage disposal came on all by itself.

So we both flew down there, and it wouldn't respond to the switch. It kept running, so we unplugged it and will take a look at it tomorrow, but what a crazy thing that is. Anybody else ever had that happen?

Sounds like a Twilight Zone episode.

It was peckish and needed a night time snack!

Usually, the simplest answer is the correct answer: Ghosts.

Some houses, Elijah comes to have a drink; your house, he comes to run the garbage disposal. Don't argue with a prophet.

I think Spielberg made a movie with a similar theme. Long time ago. Quite entertaining it turned out to be. Any good exorcists in the Puget Sound area?

power surges in your area?

It has to be the switch that failed. If you have a vacuum switch, there should also be a wall switch. Vacuum switches aren't all that reliable, though they are very convenient.

John

[Jenise]

It has to be the switch that failed. If you have a vacuum switch, there should also be a wall switch. Vacuum switches aren't all that reliable, though they are very convenient.

John

Bob suspects that it's the switch too. But no, there isn't also a wall switch on this one--air only. (The other is wall only.)

I understand the technology is there to do the reverse - i.e. if there is a power shortage, that your appliances can be turned off remotely (and without your permission), in order to (say) keep a hospital powered up (or more likely something more frivolous for a senior public servant).

Just throwing this out...we have a button on our granite counter that we push to run the disposal. Also a wall switch. We use the counter button all the time. There have been a couple of times, when we were entertaining or very talkative, kitchen TV on, etc. that neither of us turned off the counter button. It is a very quiet unit. It did not take us long to discover the disposal still running once the kitchen was quiet. Not good.

Bob suspects that it's the switch too. But no, there isn't also a wall switch on this one--air only. (The other is wall only.)

Hm. I was told it was "code" in Santa Clara County. Actually, I was very happy to have it that way. It reduced the chances of unhappy experiments by small children. Or big ones.

John

[Jenise]

Hm. I was told it was "code" in Santa Clara County. Actually, I was very happy to have it that way. It reduced the chances of unhappy experiments by small children. Or big ones.

John

Apparently not code here! The prep sink (where this happened) only has the air switch. Anyway, Bob took it apart and you were right, the air switch burned up. Scary to think what would have happened if we hadn't been home. Hopefully, it would have tripped the breaker before catching the kitchen on fire, but who knows. Not very safe.

I'm glad you found the problem, and glad nothing really bad happened. It's one of the joys of owning a house, I guess!

John

Yikes! That's a bit scary, Jenise. Glad it happened the way it did.

It's great to have a handy guy in the house, isn't it?

[Jenise]

Karen, it sure is. But boy, electrical stuff is scary. This is the third thing that's happened here in nine years that could have started a fire--and one actually did--a dimmer switch was smoldering and we could smell it. All the smoke was in the wall but if we'd ignored that and gone to bed, or been away, it would have been bad. It was in the center of the house at the base of the stairs, so the whole house would have been involved before anyone noticed smoke outside. Last week we found an outlet in the garage that had burned up, too.

Oh, and then there was the time I found the entire downstairs full of black smoke. I couldn't tell what was burning, but it was so thick I was choking on it so I called 911, then Bob at work, and then ignored the Fire Department's instructions to leave immediately and started evacuating the cats. I decided I needed help so I ran out to the street just to see if there was anyone around and there between my house and the one next door was a guy with a little white utility company truck and the hatch off something in the ground.

"What are you doing?," I demanded, "I need help!" He said he was testing something, and I demanded, "Is that putting smoke in my house?"

"Well, technically it could--"

"My house is full of smoke. The fire department's coming."

"But it wouldn't be very much--"

"COME IN HERE!", I instructed, and yanked him in through the garage straight into the black cloud which made him go, "F---! Maybe there IS a fire!"

Well, there wasn't, it was all from his testing equipment, but it was so thick and I had already inhaled so much I had to be given oxygen. So not really a close call like the dimmer switch fire, but it sure felt like one.

[Jenise]

So the upshot: The air switch had been improperly installed. There's an air hose that goes down into the starter switch; on a properly installed one, the hose goes down below the switch then comes back up and into the switch, creating a p-trap. Ours was installed with the air hose going straight down in the switch, so apparently when a little water leaked in, it went straight down the hose and into the switch, shorting it out. Bob was able to buy just that part for five bucks from a hot tub supply place and do the change-out himself, otherwise it would have been $75 or so for a new switch.

It's one of those things that's obvious, after you know what the problem is. <sigh>

John