Spooked by sparking space heaters

Well, at least I’m not sweating, I used to say, in winter, when it wasn’t 80 degrees and muggy out.

That’s using “winter” loosely, right now, as technically it is not winter, yet. Winter begins with the solstice at 5:44 a.m. Wednesday and lasts until the vernal equinox at 6:29 am EDT Monday, March 20.

So it is not winter, yet. It just seems so because of all the holiday decorations and ubiquitous Christmas music you just can’t get away from and why are singing about snow, anyway? Ain’t no snow here. Only lately have we even had rain.

I broke a perfectly good holiday sweat raking leaves Saturday, and I guess that’s OK. I don’t mind a little climate change as long as I don’t have to use the space heaters.

I’ve been paranoid about space heaters ever since 1981 or ’82, when I lived in a mobile home, in Auburn, where I was in college, and the weather turned freezing and the trailer’s central heat went out.

So I went out and got a cheap space heater, but neglected to get a not-so-cheap extension cord.

We found another extension cord and plugged the space heater into it and moved the heater to where we could feel the heat and watch TV at the same time

And after a couple of hours my roommate got up to move the space heater, and when he did, the extension cord fell apart in a shower of sparks, its orange, glowing, smoking, sizzling wire burned in two.

Imagine that happening overnight. The trailer fire would have started right in front of the door, too, because that’s where the extension cord ran.

The sound and stench of burning electrical wire sticks with you. My grandparents had a kitchen fire that burned through their wall, leaving a big hole to the outside. I was a curious kid playing in the fire damage when I heard a sizzling wire, saw it glowing orange, picked up a piece of broken board and poked it.

The wire popped and sparks flew. And my mother saw it through the hole in the kitchen wall and told my uncle, who yelled at me to get the hell away from the burned hole.

I would be reminded of this years later when the newspaper sent out a memo telling workers we were allowed to park in an empty lot behind a fire-damaged Broadway building. “Do not go into the burned building,” the memo warned.

I thought that was a funny thing to add. Plus it was intriguing: “Why can’t we go into the burned building? What’s in there? Are you trying to hide something?”

‘Do not go into a burned building’ could sound profound. (He who goes into a burned building comes out all ashed up.)

I had another space heater flashback the other day on Facebook, where a fire department in Texas posted a photo of a power strip someone had plugged a space heater into.

The last outlet in the strip was a charred hole. It looked like that whole end blew out all at once, maybe with a loud buzz, a shower of sparks and a cloud of black smoke.

I guess people forget that a power strip doesn’t actually add any power. It looks like it does – it’s got a heck of a lot more outlets and a nice thick cord – but it doesn’t. So plugging a heat-generating appliance into it generally is not a good idea.

Leaving a space heater running in a room you’re not in is not so smart, either, apparently, as more fires are caused by leaving something combustible too close to the heat coils.

I’ve had some experience with that, too, having learned a dog will stand right next to one until you smell burning fur and realize the dog’s on fire.

That’s an odor that sticks with you, too.

This story was originally published December 18, 2016 at 8:42 PM with the headline "Spooked by sparking space heaters."