I have read that it is a good idea to turn appliances off at the wall when not in use to prevent ‘phantom loads’ from wasting electricity and costing you money. Recently I found out that this is, in fact, a really good idea, just not for the reason they say!
For a bit of context: our electricity system takes power from the solar panels, channels into batteries, then draws power from the batteries through an inverter to power the house, and if there is excess demand, it switches over and draws power from the grid. There is, however, a persistent fault: if a large power draining appliance is turned when the power in the batteries is low, it will initially be OK, but then a bit later it will shut the system down. The system can also be set to be ‘off grid’, that is to say, not grid interactive at all.
Anyway, I woke up this morning and checked the clock by my bedside and found that the system had shut down for a short time about half an hour before I woke up. This was concerning because yesterday was a good charging day and we were not fully off grid, so what happened?
What we believe happened is this – The cat has gone foraging to see if she can find any food in the kitchen. At some stage she has accidentally trodden on the push button that activates the toaster, and the toaster has assumed we wanted to toast some bread and swung into action. Sitting over the toaster when it is not in use is a cute little fabric cover which Linda picked up many years ago. As the toaster heated up the cover started to scorch, and at that point the system shut down, cutting off all power to the toaster (and everything else), which caused the toaster to go back to sleep (fortunately).
So the result is that everything is OK except for the toaster cover, which is a little scorched (see pic). The toaster is now turned off at the wall and shall remain ever so when not in use!
