Whoops

I have two air purifiers in my place, mainly to help when wildfire smoke is happening, so they've been running 24/7 all this last week (and a few weeks ago).

One of them has an auto mode, which means if it detects particles/smoke/whatever in the air it will turn itself up higher, so I usually just leave it on this auto mode.

So yesterday was a cooler day so I chose to do a little cooking that I haven't done in a while due to heat.

Pancakes was one of the things I decided to make, and I'm probably a little out of practice or something because I noticed either my pan or the ring or my oil (or all of the above?) smoking a little but didn't think much of it.

A few pancakes in, I glanced over into my living room and noticed it was, well, a little smokey in there.  I had a moment of "it's maybe really wild fire smokey bad?" but I think I knew that no, this was a me cooking pancakes problem, so I flipped that pancake and took a look at the "auto" purifier in my bedroom and sure enough it was on HIGH POWER THERE IS BADNESS IN THE AIR mode and, er, oops, my bad!

I turned the bigger (living room) one up as high as it could go and threw on the stove top one too (which I never find useful and have no idea where it vents to if anywhere) and I adjusted the heat a bit and finished up the batch.

It took about half an hour for the auto one to go back to mellow mode and I don't really know what I did differently this time as I've never had this kind of an issue with pancakes before but similarly I don't have an awful lot of experience either, so I'm going to go with "pan too hot" which is still something I'm trying to learn in general with my stove and my pans and in this case with my cast iron pan in particular.

So yeah, fire smoke hasn't been too bad but my own personal cooking smoke apparently was!  (But thankfully, oh so very thankfully, not enough to set off my smoke alarm, I was wary of that once I noticed!)