Crock pots don’t draw anything close to 20A. I just checked a random example that’s rated at 0.21 kW, that’s 210 W, which on US household current is ~2 A and Brit-side, just less than one.
eta: On low power setting, roughly halve those amperages.
Want to burn down your house without burning yourself? Use an overloaded electrical wall plug timer!
Yep, a 200 W crock pot is going to burn out a 1250 W wall timer in quite a hurry.
As long as we’re talking about timers, not all electronic timers will work with fans. Some timers have trouble turning the fan off. I think it’s something about the inductance? If you have a fan, you want one of the older timers with a ratcheting dial.
Timer for a crockpot:
It’s fine electrically. Crockpots are slow cookers, meaning they are low power. Actually, the newer ones tend to be overpowered such that they can hardly be called slow cookers.* Light bulbs typically run hotter than crockpots. Heating loads are also the easiest of any on the switch contacts in the timer. Incandescent bulbs draw about 10X nominal current the moment they are switched on, owing to tungsten’s large thermal coefficient of resistance. Heating appliances use nichrome heating elements specifically so they don’t present such surges when turned on. Check the watt rating on the cooker and the watt rating on the timer, as long as timer rating > cooker + 100W (or so) you are good.
Engine heater timer: Fine if it is just a timer. Many of them also have a temperature sensor, so they only come on in cold weather.
Food safety wise, having dinner sit on the counter at room temperature for several hours before the cooking starts might not be a wise thing. If it were me, I would probably put in frozen meat to help mitigate this.
*You can use a router speed control to tone down the crock pot temperature. This requires some trial and error to find the correct setting.
I must have explained it poorly. 
Cool! So do you think this router speed controller would work on an average analog slow-cooker with just Hi/Lo/Auto settings?
I might have to try this, because my slow cooker just isn’t slow enough sometimes.
The talk of appliance timers reminded me of my Industrial Alarm Clock, for when you absolutely have to wake up:
Set the appliance timer for the time you need to get up. Plug your vacuum into the timer, and place it so that the switch is in an inconvenient location. Ta da!
Food safety wise, cooking meat in a crock pot from frozen might more than offset the health risks of having it sit at kitchen temperature before cooking. Slow cookers won’t defrost meat in any kind of a hurry, and the bacteria might like the window of opportunity a bit too well. You can argue that slow cooking for hours will kill any bacteria you grow that way, but in that case it would do the needful for room-temperature meat as well. One opinion.
I use to use a timer with a ghetto blaster plugged into it for an alarm clock. Worked great.
If there is a hard switch, it should work fine. The fancy pots with micro controllers, probably not. I did damage such a RSC using it in a 1500W smoker. The electronics stood the load fine, but the output socket overheated and became a fused mass of plastic. Still worked, but could not unplug it. Note that the smoker draws about 6 times what a crock pot does, and the resistive heating increases with the square of current (and has a positive feedback mechanism) so there should be absolutely no problem.
Got a bag of stale pretzels or a box of stale Cap’n Crunch? Spread them out on a cooky sheet and pop them into a 250-275 degree F oven for a few minutes and they’ll crisp right up. This works for many crunchy/crispy snacks. Seal them up in a ziplock bag before they cool if you want to keep the new freshness.
I’m picturing Cap’n Crunch with even more upper palate-shredding capabilities than before!
Couple of quick ones I don’t think are up yet.
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Toothpaste is great for cleaning CD/DVD/Game discs if they’re scratched.
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To open a jar with a stuck lid, hold the lid under the hot tap for 20 seconds or so turning the jar so you get all round. Get a dish cloth to grab the lid with and twist and away.
Not always.
Crest Pro-Health toothpaste will make the scratching worse.
In my experience, toothpaste will actually make the scratches worse. Car wax may yield better results:
[QUOTE=Ambihelical Hexnut]
My experience was with a new game DVD that had two scratches; one was on the surface of the shiny side, the other was a really nasty zigzag scratch that was embedded in the plastic (the game’s title screen wouldn’t even load).
I didn’t want to go through the hassle of returns from Amazon Marketplace sellers just for a very cheap game, so I set about fixing the problem myself. There was nothing that could be done about the embedded scratch, but I thought maybe it would work OK if I fixed the surface scratch.
I tried toothpaste, 2 different brands of furniture polish and car wax. The toothpaste was totally ineffective; it did nothing to improve the original scratch, and succeeded only in introducing dozens more tiny scratches. Furniture polish fared slightly better - there was some improvement in the appearance of the original scratch, and it didn’t introduce any more scratches. Car wax was the best; it almost totally eliminated the original scratch, as well as the vast majority of the small scratches caused by the toothpaste. Alas, the embedded scratch was the problem, so the game still didn’t work.
One thing I would suggest is not to try buffing it out too many times. I tried each of the above substances 2 - 3 times (so maybe 9 or 10 attempts in total). After all this, the two layers of plastic that make up the DVD were beginning to peel apart, so the disc had to be trashed anyway.
[/QUOTE]
Or use your Big Time Rush jelly bracelet. You don’t have one?!
So did Hamlet’s uncle* after he snuck in the garden to kill old King Hamlet.
*“A king of shreds and patches.” This will conclude the waste-of-bytes test.
Or just use a Clocky or Tocky. Falls off table and runs away. Invented by MIT kid, now for sale.
Is this safe? Cool water is always recommend to take away pain and lessen the chance of infection–hence, no butter–or other salve, I heard.