Nothing is Free

We were given a free washing machine through the conservative synagogue, and were elated as we are currently paying around 100-shekels a week to have our laundry done.  Self-service laundromats where you put quarters into machines to wash and dry your clothes are either completely unavailable here or very rare.  Instead, the laundromat is a person who runs a shop with a washing machine and dryer and she does the laundry for you and gives it back three or four days later smelling wonderful and professionally folded.

My laundromat lady is really nice.  She is from Russia and doesn't speak a word of English.  Somehow with my 10 words of Hebrew, we've figured out how to complete laundry transactions.  She knows me as Gana.  I love having my clothes professionally laundered, but it is expensive, and I can't afford to have the sheets and blankets cleaned as often as I would prefer.

So the washing machine was a G-d-send.  Except nothing is free.

Our apartment has a little nook for a washing machine.  There is a one-hose attachment  for the incoming water, and a hole in the wall leading to the bathroom so the water can drain out into the bathtub.  Ahhh, modern conveniences.

I had concerns about the washing machine working.  It does work.  In fact, it works, and works, and works and never stops.  We did a trial load of sheets, knowing I could hang them on the clothesline and they would dry in a few hours.  I started the machine at 9am and at 11am, it was still going through a wash cycle.  We manually made it go into the spin cycle and finally it stopped.

After two hours of being washed, the sheets came out really clean.  I hung them on the clothesline outside the bedroom window to dry.  For the record, when you're on the ground hanging clothes on a clothesline it is a rather pleasant activity.  When you're leaning out of a 3rd floor window of a building built alongside a mountain so the drop is even greater than three stories, hanging out clothes is really hard...and kind of scary.  I'm rather short and really had to reach out there.

When we originally plugged in the washing machine -- and that's all we did, we didn't turn it on, we didn't do anything else, we just plugged in the washing machine -- the electricity in the apartment went off.  The act of plugging in the washing machine blew the circuit breaker.  Then after doing the sheets and finally making the machine stop, we left it plugged in.  Later that day we started having electrical surges.  So we unplugged the washing machine and the electrical surges have stopped.

How could this even be happening??  This doesn't seem possible in terms of physics to have an appliance plugged in the appropriate outlet, not even in use, and yet it causes electrical surges.  Is this Israeli appliance engineering at its worst or crappy wiring?