I don’t remember if this was reported on E-C.net or some other board but a weird case of intermittent light-dimming involved a refrigerator/freezer in a remote, dark corner of a new residential garage. The appliance cord was something like a foot short of the wall receptacle, so someone used a wadded-up 100-foot 16/3 extension cord to make up the difference. The refrigerator was not yet used for storing anything—someone figured that it should be powered up just the same.
The compressor would try to start but stall in a locked rotor condtion that would cause excessive voltage drop in the cord—so it could never start, and cycled on the compressor’s thermal overload for weeks. It took that long before the dangeoursly warm cord was discovered.
