Skip to main content

TIFU trying to be an appliance-efficiency wizard and nearly started a dorm fire with a hair dryer

TIFU, and yes this actually happened this morning.

I'm a 26-year-old engineering student in Texas and I obsess over saving energy. Our apartment is tiny, the AC bill is ridiculous, and the dryer takes forever, so I air-dry a lot of clothes. I washed a load last night, hung some nicer stuff inside, and went to bed hoping the humidity would be kind. It was not.

Bright idea at 7 a.m.: use my hair dryer on the coolest setting to gently speed things up, kind of like pretending I'm running a tiny heat pump. I draped a pair of pants over a chair, pointed the dryer at them, and set it on the floor next to the chair while I did my makeup and packed my bag.

Five minutes later I caught that hot-plastic smell. The dryer's intake had sucked in the edge of a towel I had put down to catch drips, and the towel was plastered to the rear grill. The dryer started sounding horrible and the towel was getting uncomfortably warm. I yanked the plug so fast I almost pulled the outlet out of the wall, then spent several minutes patting the towel and checking for flames while my heart did parkour.

Now I have damp clothes, a hair dryer that smells like toasted lint, and the new realization that my energy-hack hobby can be dangerous.

So, what actually works for drying clothes fast in a small apartment without running a full dryer cycle? I want safe, practical routines or gear recommendations. No suggestions that involve me creating some space-heater trap, please.

TL;DR: Tried to speed-dry clothes with a hair dryer, it sucked in a towel and overheated, and I almost started a fire. Need safe fast-drying tips.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

TIFU - Don’t do what I did

On Sunday morning Aug. 24th, I awoke to discover a large blind spot in my right eye, which turned out to be what is called wet age-related macular degeneration (AMD). It has resulted in a very significant, permanent loss of vision in that eye. Although I maintain good peripheral vision, whatever I focus on at best is very blurry, and mostly disappears. I can barely make out the large E at the top of the eye chart. If this happens to my left eye I’ll be unable to read or drive. It turns out that I missed the opportunity that I had to prevent this from becoming a serious problem because I failed to report what appeared to be minor changes in my vision. In the weeks prior to August I had noticed that what I knew to be straight lines appeared to my right eye to have a little waviness. I also noticed that the color of my front lawn, which I could see through the window from my recliner,  was subdued, looked almost gray, in my right eye. So I scheduled an eye exam, which revealed the p...
Post a Comment
Read more

TIFU by getting suspended for 2 days by my front office in school.

I (13M) am an African American student at Jeannette junior high who had got suspended for 2 days here. I was in math class minding my business until my teacher had told me to go to the main office, which posed no problem to me. As i went down there, the people of the front office had stopped me and made me get a new ID (yes, we have id's.) so i had asked them if i could maybe do a different alternative and call my mother to let her bring the Id here, even then, the Id isn't that important. So, although i was talking to them in a calm manner and not showing any signs of rebellion, they had threatened to call the police on me without thinking twice before calling my parents. This is where i started getting angry, and even then now the black peers agree that could have been a racially motivated action. They then told me to sit in the office conference room because of that, leading into more anger. They had then called my mother who had came over to the school didn't even let ...
Post a Comment
Read more

TIFU Accidentally taught my 4 year old nephew the word chlamydia

So I very awkwardly taught my nephew, the word chlamydia the other day and not in the way that you would think… It was actually very innocent. I was with one of my sister’s friends and my friends who’s become part of the family and I was telling her about an interesting fact, not thinking about how my nephew was right beside us. I told her did you know that koalas can get chlamydia and that they can give it to humans… just a fun fact… and then he who can barely say clear words most of the time clearest day said koala chlamydia so that happened And he went to his grandmother’s house today, so I’m kinda hoping he doesn’t say that, but at the same time I would die laughter and about pee my pants if he did because holy crap, how do you react to that? TL:DR I shared a fact about koalas and my nephew hung on to two words from the sentence. Those two words which he repeated were koala chlamydia.
Post a Comment
Read more