Just a year after it was installed, our stovetop has started acting funny. Sort of working… but sort of not. Sometimes it just refuses to work. (I could insert some snide remark here about how its simply French.) You turn it on to boil water and full blast is, well, too much effort. So you turn it down a notch. Then another. Then another. Until you have enough heat to cook some things but not enough to boil a pot of water for spaghetti. And if youre lucky, you notice this problem before youve put the spaghetti in to cook.
The other night Bill used some voltage-meter that only an engineer would keep around the house and measured the output of one of our outlets. It was less than 200. Not what its supposed to be. We chalked up the finicky stove to an appliance simply not getting enough power to do its job.
Tonight was try two at spaghetti.
I turned on the stove… watched it for a while… all was fine…. so I went about doing other chores while waiting for the pot to boil. (We all know that you cant watch the pot if you want it to boil.) I took towels out of the clothes dryer… folded them and put them away… went back to move the wet laundry from the washer to the dryer… turned it on… the noticed the stove blinking that it couldnt boil that water. So I turned off the dryer. And the stove worked just fine.
Maybe if we lived in a house thats a hundred years old itd be easier to accept the idea that you cannot run two appliances at the same time. But the house is closer to three years old. And the idea that you cannot run two appliances at the same time is simply baffling.
Try putting the spaghetti in the washer and the wet clothes in a pile on the stove.