consumer affairs says it can be 'energized'.
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I can offer more insight on this. I have the exact numbers recorded from the incident with the landlady. The voltage at the outlet was 120.3 VAC (so a DC voltage with this number would dissipate the same power across a resistive load). The series shunt resistor had a value of 0.01017 Ohms (it was just ten 0.1 ohm 1% resistors in parallel). Thus, using the information that when the toaster was plugged in, but the heating element wasn't engaged, that the voltmeter
showed 0.02mV, we can calculate the power draw was 0.236 Watts. However, electrical engineers would be suspicious of that and rightly so, because as I was taking this measurement, I remember the voltmeter showed the value going down and down, exactly like what happens when you just touch the voltmeter terminals together. In laymen's terms, there was no power flowing through that toaster.
Until someone comes along who is actively and intimately engaged with voltage tolerances on voltmeters, I can only speculate and try to remember what my EE profs said about it. Here's an info sheet:
http://www.d.umn.edu/~snorr/ece2006f7/Lab1.pdf . But I think I can speculate fairly well, and lets say that the voltmeter was autoranged for the 2mV setting. Then, 0mV +/- 0.02 mV includes the value I measured. So 0mV +/- 0.02 mV is a good guess perhaps, at a more accurate measurement of the voltage of that shunt resistor with the toaster plugged in but not having the heating element engaged. We can now have fun and infer that the power draw could have been as small a number as we want. 10^-999 Watts, according to what I'm assuming here, would be a valid measurement for the power draw through that toaster in the plugged in and off state.
I could have instead used a shunt resistor that was 100000x larger to get a more accurate measurement maybe. But I chose that value so that I had a value that was actually useful for measuring REAL power draws when stuff is actually on. It can I believe, safely and also fairly accurately measure the power draw of any household appliance, so that's why I used that value of 1/100th of an ohm. I remember calculating the power draw of the toaster when it was on, and I wish I included it in the podcast, but the voltage across the shunt resistor was 66.6 mV.
THE NUMBER OF THE BEAST.
That must have blown the landlady's mind. I don't know what a conspiratorially minded person like her thought when she saw "666" on the measuring device used by the guy to show her she was wrong, but it's fun to speculate. Anyways, that showed the toaster drew 760 W when it was on I think.
As a sidenote Deirdre, when you said "they could catch fire even if they weren't turned on", that was what I was initially wondering was the reason for unplugging it. That's what people at work thought at first too. But the woman was adamant that parasitic power was the reason for unplugging it. But then I thought, there's a higher chance of that wire becoming damaged the more it's used, so it would be safer to just leave it in all the time probably. Less chance of damaging the wire due to wear and tear then. But on the other hand if you unplug one device you should do it for all of the things in your house, and let's be honest, we don't, so I don't know.
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So if I could sum all that up, I think it actually is more expensive to buy the food necessary to for the biochemical fuel for your muscles to unplug and replug the toaster every time, than it would be to just leave it in and pay the electrical company for the "parasitic power" of the toaster.