So, one of the unfortunaties of using archaic domestic appliances, as I’m prone to wanting to do*, is that as far as I can tell one of the traditional failure modes for these things is to attempt to burn your abode to the ground. Whilst modern equipment would, I’m sure, love to partake in this fun and enjoyable experience, ongoing design developments seem to have made this less of a feature of devices. My old TV set – the beloved beastie – sported the instruction “DO NOT LEAVE SET SWITCHED ON UNATTENDED” and ran hotter than the sun (it actually had a heat haze above it when it’d been on more than a few minutes)**.
Anyway, combining ancient equipment with archaic (and frankly very dodgy***) wiring lead to a thoroughly 70’s experience for Kathryn this morning. Our iron caught fire. This is our iron:
As you can see, it’s a delightfully 70’s appliance. Actually, it’s probably a 60’s appliance. It’s a hoover 4554 which was Hoover’s revision of the first steam iron sold in the UK. And, apart from today’s little flaming escapade it’s served both us and my parents ever so well. It makes steam and gets hot. The two requirements for a steam iron. It also spits out flecks of scale occasionally, but hey, it’s possibly 50 years old.
Technically, the iron itself didn’t really catch fire – although the rubber flex support did, a bit, smolder, I’d guess. It was the…flex that caught fire. Having carefully monitored the flex where the outer had split revealing the inner insulated cores, the bloody thing was quietly and invisibly destroying the insulation where it entered the iron’s flex-support. And today with no warning**** it did this:
Which was unfortunate, really. Fortunately Kathryn dealt with the situation and saved us from flaming explodey irony death. The fuse, thankfully, appears to have done its stuff too, so whilst an earth leak trip would probably have killed things faster, and possibly without the flames, the safety feature that it does have did its thing, saving it from getting worse.
So today, having stripped it down and decided that yes, I could fairly easily replace the flex I headed off into the yonder that is Bristol with the intention of picking up some braided flex to replace the flex on there…
…yeah. In our consumerist society where people chuck the damn things in the bin as soon as they break it’s not quite so simple. A very nice chap in an appliance repair place apologised, explained they’d stopped stocking it because it’s very expensive for them to buy, and then no one buys it, and no one wants their irons recabled anymore. He also apologised because he’d had a pile of dead irons which he cleared out last week which, you see, would have provided a cable as a spare.
Another shop similarly no longer carried it. Another shop had run out, but commented on it’s pricey nature. Yet another shop had run out…
I was beginning to consider it a lost cause – although each shop (it being Gloucester Road) pointed me at another shop that might have it in stock *****, and thinking of it as my last but one point of call (Maplin being the end point) I wandered into Ablectrics who said they only had one size in stock and it might be ‘a bit big’. Obviously, they’ve forgotten what old iron cables are like and I pounced on it, buying a nice 2m chunk.
Digging inside the poor beastie on my return home, I found that the cable was….rubber.Which I’m not sure I was really aware of. I think I’d vaguely considered the possibility that it might be rubber, but really, I thought, it’s probably not. Internally, the rubber is sheathed in some heat protective insulative substance which had thankfully survived because taking it off revealed the extent of the degradation of the insulation…
Still, fitting the new wire didn’t take that long. It’s very….white. Which looks oddly out of place on the iron, but less fire-making ability is always handy. I’m pleased to say that despite my fears (which involved resting the iron outside, first), it did in fact work perfectly. And thus, we hope, it will go on to provide irony goodness for another 30 years :)
* We have a 1960’s hoover, a 1960’s hoover iron, a 1950s radio, a 1950’s telephone… they all work, although the radio needs new tuner string. I’ve temporarily threaded it with thread, however it’s too stretchy (but it keeps the path)… I think it could do with a service too. The hoover and the iron though have, until now, just worked.
** I would, actually, probably still be using that set had it not spectacularly blown it’s line output transformer, and potentially a large number of other components. I’d’ve kept using it just out of sheer stubbornness, and joy at watching digital media through a UHF converter…
*** Whilst our house has an ‘earth’ it doesn’t actually go anywhere. It runs (we presume) around all the sockets in the house, back to the fusebox, where it stops. Doing…nothing useful. The electrician probably only didn’t condemn our wiring there and then because he’s coming in to replace it.
**** Kathryn said there was a brief smell of hot-plastic last time she used it, but she thought she’d caught something on the thing she was ironing, and the smell didn’t persist…so there was perhaps a tiny warning, but not really enough to be considered as a true warning.
***** Which is a nice thing about Gloucester Road, unlike a lot of stores where you go ‘Have you got X’ and they just say ‘No’, my experience of Gloucester Road is that they will try and suggest somewhere else that can help…
