Frank, The wiring running into the fuse box... What do they look like? Cloth/fibrer covered or plactic covered?
Plastic.
A grandson of the ancient elderly gentleman came by late last night, to pick up his completed income taxes.
He said that when he was about 10 years old, the house was rewired, and that would place it in the early 1990s. It was rewired so as to accomodate a window air-conditioner, a washing machine, a dryer, and an automatic dishwasher.
There are special outlets for all of these things, but currently unused.
The house was occupied until the mid-1980s by an elderly woman a descendant of the original homesteaders (and constructors of the house). After she died, a rancher rented the property, the idea being that one of his ranch-hands could live here, keeping an eye on his property and cattle at this end of the county (free housing is oftentimes a fringe benefit of ranch-handery).
That didn't quite work out, and so as an inducement to get someone to live here, all this electrical work was done.
But that still didn't work out, because this is in an out-of-the-way place, and wives of ranch-hands prefer to live where the action is; i.e., in the more-populated areas of the county, closer to towns. Women apparently prefer congested areas.
And so the house was vacant for about ten years, until I came to this area, and by serendipitous chance, and because I was looking around for a better place to accomodate the cats (there were then four then), and wished to get away from the congestion of town life, it was offered to me to live in; in exchange for "rent," I eyeball the cattle and horses kept across the road (I'm not sure for what; nothing's ever happened to them while I've been here).
Since it had been vacant, before I moved out here, per county law, the water, electrical connections, natural gas connections, were checked out. The county does not have such inspectors; they had to come from the "big city" to do this. And everything passed with flying colors.
The electric bill for January shows a "usage" of "281;" as mentioned earlier, the only real user of electricity here is the refrigerator. I have no idea what "281" is, but probably a lot of it is the blower in the natural gas furnace, as January had been, even for Nebraska, an incredibly cold month.
I suspect--and not being an expert, if someone disagrees, holler--the problem was that I had been using an ancient hot-water vaporizer, circa 40-50 years old, constantly for two months, and it finally burned out, causing the problem.
Something in it burned out; I took it apart to look at the insides, before I tossed it.
There is a certain danger to using ancient electrical appliances, but damn it, there are no modern-day equivalents, and so one has to take his chances. I have never found a new, or even reasonably new, hot-water vaporizer that works like they're supposed to, pumping out steam with the velocity of a steam locomotive, pumping out steam that peels the wallpaper off the walls.
Many electrical appliances are wimps, compared with what they used to be.
