Assuming you own a toaster, and you use it at least occasionally, do you routinely unplug it after use?
Our toaster it stored in a cabinet in our kitchen island. We get it out and plug it in when we need it, which is a few times a week.
I use it so often, it would be a pain to put it away in a cupboard somewhere. So if I leave it out on a counter, why would I unplug it?
I have small-ish children, so yes. If it was just my wife and I, then we probably wouldn’t bother. But since the boys might dick with the toaster or decide on a whim that seeing what happens when you toast a toy dinosaur is a good idea, we keep it unplugged.
Is there a reason we should unplug it? Genuinely interested to know, there’s a million things in the house which are never unplugged - cooker and TV spring to mind. Is there something particularly hazardous or energy draining about an unused toaster?
Mine is an under-cabinet mounted toaster oven, so no, it stays plugged in.
Plugged in, due to lack of awareness of any danger in doing so, and laziness.
There is an on/off switch next to the toaster plug though, and I do switch that off.
Oh, just realised I read the question wrong and answered Yes instead of No :smack: :o
My toaster is huge (4 bagel slots!) and my kitchen is very small so mine is stored away.
I do always unplug it the minute I’m done using it. I’m totally paranoid about fires and electrocution, like I’m going to accidentally drop a knife in there when I’m doing something else in the kitchen. And god forbid it spontaneously combusts while I’m out and the dogs are home alone.
Yes I have appliances and alarm clocks and computers plugged in elsewhere that could also go kerflooey. But unplugging the toaster is quick and easy.
When firing up the Google Machine to answer this question you receive multiple cites that say toasters should remain unplugged due to them being a fire hazard. There are reports of house fires caused by faulty toasters as well as recalls due to such fires.
Toasters are considered more dangerous than, say, can openers or DVD players because of the heat they generate.
They can also be turned on by accident quite easily (at least ‘traditional’ toasters). All it takes is something leaning or falling on them. Maybe a cookbook falling over or something tossed onto the kitchen counter in haste. Once the spring on the toaster has been depressed/engaged, it automatically starts heating up . . .
I’m not saying something couldn’t spontaneously go wrong with them, but it would have to fail in multiple places to start on fire. It would both have to turn it self on AND keep itself from turning off. It could happen, but ISTM that if it could happen to the toaster, any device in your house is just as likely to fail with catastrophic results.
In the past, we’ve had threads like this and it always seems like what people unplug or won’t use when they’re out of the house is pretty random. Some people unplug the toaster, but not the oven. Many people won’t use a dryer if they’re not home, but I’ve never known anyone to shut down their furnace or water heater when they’re not home for fear of fire.
For me personally, I’ll take reasonable precautions, but I, again personally, don’t see the need to unplug things when I’m out of the house. Once you start going down that road, you really can’t stop until you’re at the point of shutting off the gas/water/elec where they enter the house. You can unplug the toaster, but a pipe can leak and flood the basement. You can shut off the water, but you could have an electrical short and end up with a fire in the wall. It just goes on and on.
The only thing I do on any kind of a regular basis is shut off the water main and water heater if I’m going to be out of the house for more than a weekend or so.
I could be wrong, but I’ll bet that even if you held the switch down, either nothing would happen (other than getting hot) or the nichrome wires would break and everything would shut down long before it would present any real danger.
I had the fire service round my house last winter, when my slightly crazy next door neighbour took too many sleeping pills and left her dinner in the oven.
As the overcooked dinner resulted in nothing more than a lot of smoke, but three fire engines turned up, they decided to make the visit worthwhile and do some fire assessments on the neighbours to see if we had anything dodgy on the go.
In chatting to the fire officer, turns out their biggest call out is for dishwashers going up in smoke. People are in the habit of leaving their dishwashers running when they leave the house and apparently they are prone to problems - I guess electricity and water don’t mix well.
He didn’t mention toasters. Wish I could go back and ask him now.
The cats aren’t supposed to be up on the counter, but they often are. Toasters could easily go on if stepped on. Even if there isn’t a hazard, why use the power?
And apparently there is a hazard; every once in a while I read in the news about a fire started by one or another kitchen appliance. Yes, occasionally problems are caused by a furnace; but I’ve got active reason to leave the furnace on, as I don’t want the house (including the cats and the water pipes) to freeze while I’m away, or even to come back to a house that’s down to 35ºF and will take hours to warm back up. I’ve got no reason to leave the toaster, or the microwave, or a toaster oven, or a lot of other possible items plugged in. (The main oven plugs in behind the stove, next to impossible to get at. I don’t bother going down to the basement to shut it off at the circuit breaker, either.)
Plus which, not protecting against every possible danger doesn’t mean that protecting against some dangers isn’t worthwhile. I’d be safer if I never drove anywhere; but I do drive, even sometimes when it’s not urgent. That doesn’t mean there’s no sense in putting my seatbelt on.
One of my friends was in an absolute panic one day because she fell asleep (for the night) with a pizza in the oven and she was flipping out because she could have caused a fire. I couldn’t get it through to her that a pizza isn’t all that likely to catch on fire in a 350 degree oven and if you’re going to have a fire in your house, inside of an oven is about the best place to have it. It’s designed to contain heat.
Most fire departments seem to have a pretty active facebook page. You could probably ask them there.
Quite possible. Maybe the more important thing, then, is to make sure there’s no paper or other combustibles near the toaster. But leaving it unplugged also works.
I think some of you are envisioning a cat knocking an apple from a high shelf that bounces off the blender and lands squarely on the toaster level, depressing the level and thereby heating up the coils.
I think the real concern is faulty design or electrical malfunction within the toaster causing it to turn on, get real hot, and ignite the NY Times crossword someone carelessly left near the appliance.
I had been in the “leave it plugged in” camp for many years, a couple months ago, after running across some of the same things about safety, I started unplugging it.
Mostly this has resulted in me scratching my head, wondering why the toast is taking so long, before remembering that I have to plug it in.
I have to reset the toaster every time I plug it in, so no, I don’t unplug it. I figure the chance of it spontaneously catching on fire is so remote as to not be worth worrying about.
That’s, of course, always a good idea. Mine is right next to the side of my fridge so I’m always making sure there’s nothing stuck to the fridge that could be an issue. Some of the things that have been there for a long enough time have curled from years of being there.
Same with the oven. Even if I just got home and I know it hasn’t been used all day, I have a hard time setting anything combustible on it. For some reason I can’t convince myself that I’m not actually absent minded enough that I’ll turn on the stove with a bunch of groceries on top of it.