Automatic shut off power socket

November 5, 2024 2:47 PM

I have a very nice toaster from Dualit, which looks good and sturdy but seems likely to burn my house down. It operates with a mechanical timer, which today malfunctioned and didn't finish the countdown and therefore the heating elements didn't shut of. So it burnt my toast to a crisp, got really hot and had I not been around would have caught fire. As it cost a lot of money I am not quite ready to throw it out. I bought a new Timer but would like some additional safety measures in place, specifically a outlet with an automatic shut off function. There is indeed such a product, but the fastest shut off time is 15 minutes, which is too long, should be maximum 5 minutes, best would be three, but I could not find such a thing. I guess I could use some kind of smart device but could not quite make out if they can be programmed like that, and there are a lot of them, also quite expensive. Any tips?
posted by SweetLiesOfBokonon to Home & Garden (18 answers total)

Personally, I would not trust my life to a Rube Goldberg collection of not-fail-safes. Because everything you have mentioned fails in a way your toaster stays on until the resulting fire destroys itself.
posted by Back At It Again At Krispy Kreme at 2:56 PM on November 5

The toaster itself seems to have a 1 year warranty, and beyond that, it looks like the company also performs repairs. I’d suggest troubleshooting the issue with the toaster’s timer, instead of adding more complexity.
posted by bluloo at 3:04 PM on November 5

Yeah, as far as I know, all Dualit timers are clockwork, and they all fail this way eventually. It's the reason I ditched mine. Notably, Dualit does sell replacement timers, but if you read through the comments it's a bunch of people saying charming things like "instantly resolved the malfunction of my toaster cycle stopping but continuing to toast bread" and "After years of good service the timer intermitently [sic] ceased to wind down as it should (potentially dangerous if toast is left cooking unattended)."

For a while I used a smart plug with a software timer but it wasn't clear it was rated for toaster-level amperages (I had to lie to the system and say the load was a lamp which happened to be named "toaster") and that also seemed like asking for trouble.

In any case, I love the idea of repairable appliances, but I'm pretty sure it's engineering malpractice to design a toaster with a failure mode that's basically "starts a kitchen fire." I'd also note recent models have a note warning you to unplug when not in use printed on the face of the dial, so the company seems to be dealing with this by promoting a fiction that Dualit users make their toast and immediately disconnect their toaster from the socket, rendering the stuck timer harmless. We now have a nice Panasonic toaster oven.
posted by pullayup at 3:16 PM on November 5

Side-remark which does not entirely address the question at hand but which provides an avenue around the stated problem:

If you can spring for an old Sunbeam Radiant Control Toaster, do so.

...you probably can, given that you have a Dualit, and the Sunbeam is fully mechanical with no timers of any kind, just very clever engineering. You will need to surf eBay for a while, and it will be expensive (because they're so excellent), but it will be the best toaster you've ever owned and I have no idea why some Bay Area startup hasn't done a crowdfunding round to build a new version.
posted by aramaic at 4:33 PM on November 5

My sister's house did burn down last year due to a faulty appliance. She narrowly escaped, and dealing with the damage made her life a living hell for 13 months. Whatever that Dualit cost you, it is not worth the potential loss of life, grief, trauma, and aggravation. I would trash it immediately.
posted by mama penguin at 4:34 PM on November 5

which looks good and sturdy

In one sense, toasters and other kitchen appliances that produce heat should NOT be "sturdy". Lots of electric kettles and such have a conductive part that will melt if it gets to too high of a temperature. And then the kettle never works again, but if the appliance starts a fire it isn't going to work again either.

The idea is that the machine fails by no longer working, instead of being "sturdy" and working so well it sets your house on fire. Sturdy isn't always good.

A relative had a toaster catch fire, fortunately it was noticed quickly and only burnt the underside of a kitchen cabinet.
posted by yohko at 4:39 PM on November 5

If you measure the wattage, you could try and find an appropriate power strip with a fuse sized to blow if the toaster runs more than one toast needs.
posted by nickggully at 6:14 PM on November 5

> If you measure the wattage, you could try and find an appropriate power strip with a fuse sized to blow if the toaster runs more than one toast needs.

I don't think electricity works like that
posted by anadem at 6:49 PM on November 5

How much did this toaster cost? How much did everything else you keep in your home cost? I would write the two numbers down side by side and then throw the toaster in the trash - with the cord cut off, please, so nobody else tries to use it either!
posted by nouvelle-personne at 7:19 PM on November 5

Anadem: Look up slow-blow fuses.
posted by nickggully at 7:27 PM on November 5

This is not a very nice toaster, this is a sunk cost fallacy. I would absolutely not trust a toaster with this failure mode, and in fact I would be contacting the manufacturer demanding a refund regardless of warranty status of the toaster. Adding complexity also adds more things to go wrong so adding a separate timed outlet just means you're trusting another device to not fail.
posted by Aleyn at 7:38 PM on November 5

If anyone's going to crowdfund a new version of an old toaster I think it should be the Toast-O-Lator, which had only one slot and a conveyer belt.

You put the bread on the belt and it was run through a gauntlet of hot wires, emerging on the other side nicely toasted as darkly or lightly as you wanted according to the speed you chose for the belt.

If you positioned a plate at the output the toast would fall right onto the plate without being touched. It was pretty, too. I have no idea why it wasn’t more popular.
posted by jamjam at 9:56 PM on November 5

Regardless of what you do, even if you replace it entirely, you can’t walk away from a toaster in use any more than you can a waffle iron in use or a pot of oil on a hot burner. No, you don’t need to stand there staring at it, but you can’t leave the kitchen. And you should have a kitchen fire extinguisher.
posted by slkinsey at 4:08 AM on November 6

There are light switches with timers, physical ones designed to be used hundreds, if not thousands, of times. While that would solve your problem, it's also overkill and a bit noisy. I found a cheap timer on Amazon that you can plug into a surge protector or wall plug. Your device plugs into it, you choose time increments, say 15 minutes, and turn it on, and the power out turns off in 15 minutes. Very simple to use. I have it for charging e-bike batteries where I want the charger to go off after a set period and not just keep running.

I would not use either of those for your scenario. A runaway toaster's potential failure is too high to risk on a consumer gadget.

Make sure you don't plug your toaster into a cheap surge protector, which can melt before a circuit breaker can flip. That's a common cause of house fires.
posted by diode at 5:56 AM on November 6

A Tapo brand smart plug with power monitor can absolutely do this. You can set auto power off times as small as one minute. You can also set “do not exceed” power shutoff limits.

But you should cut the cord off this toaster and throw it away.
posted by CharlesDeP at 8:09 AM on November 6

anadem: I don't think electricity works like that

Electricity doesn't work like that indeed.

A fuse would blow only if the current through the heater increased significantly after a couple of minutes. Unsurprisingly it doesn't. At least not sufficiently so to reliably and repeatably blow a fuse after one-toast-time-length-and-a-bit while not blowing just after one-toast-time-length.

Slow-blow fuses act in the order of seconds where fast fuses blow in several tens of milliseconds; they're meant to handle start-up currents that exceed the fuse rating, then drop back to well less than the rating. That's not going to help protecting a runaway toaster; only a timer or a temperature fuse will.
posted by Stoneshop at 9:30 AM on November 6

Automatic shutoff outlet.

When I managed an in-person office, my coworkers advocated for a toaster oven. The oven had a setting where it could be turned on indefinitely at 450 degrees - so it was possible to forget the oven was on and lock up for the night/weekend.

My compromise was to use this countdown timer. You can still set it long enough to burn your house down (an hour), but if you hit the button for 10 minutes before you start prepping the bread, probably it will be safe if the worst happens (you pass out after putting bread in the toaster on the day the timer fails),
posted by sol at 10:02 AM on November 6

A heat detector (not smoke alarm) is a useful defence against this problem, but if you do decide to give up on the Dualit, they retain a decent value on ebay, fully working with no dents or scratches will fetch at least 50% of the new price.
posted by Lanark at 11:06 AM on November 6