Indeed, I would need to test the suitability of the fuse with a few test cycles. But after the central heating pump (albeit unproven) set fire to the kitchen and room above back in 2003 and killed four of my animals, with smoke damage throughout the whole house, I’m very paranoid about overheating. In fact though the cause is very unclear and we were not in the house at the time, because I had just had a serious operation in Fort William on the mainland so Janet was staying with me at the Belford hospital.
When our washing machine decided to start melting, when we were in London, the fuse never blew; the thing just started pouring out toxic smoke. Luckily Janet was at home but unfortunately I was not, and she was a hero manhandling the thing out of the house into the garden. In doing this she got a whiff of poison gas (cyanide?) and had bad lungs for a week or two. The fire brigade arrived and stuck a crowbar under the top of the washing machine, flipping it off and flames shot way up high, as the oxygen got in to it, so Janet told me. We said very harsh words to the manufacturer and got a better washing machine, further up the range, as a replacement, after iirc mentioning a popular BBC consumer affairs programme.
The point occurs to me that that’s one advantage of a ground floor flat: you have a garden (yay
) and can shift fiery kit out into it; in an upstairs flat you can’t reasonably hoik a washing machine out of a window.
My dear friend Alistair had a similar experience, white-goods catching fire in his house in West Yorkshire, smoke damage ruining the whole house as happened to me in Skye. It took a long time for him to get all the remedial work done and to sort out things with the insurance company.
Luckily for me, my insurance company was superb. Also all my computers were not in the house at the time because we were doing a lot of work on the old place, which had been a ruin, basically. So it just so happened that the computers were in another, temporary office, in Broadford five miles away, to keep them away from dust and to ensure they were not in the way of work going on. So they were completely safe, thank goodness.
I’m going to check our fire extinguishers and smoke alarms today after writing this!