We've all heard warnings about leaving small appliances plugged in 24/7, especially if said appliances tend to get hot when operated... i.e. coffee makers, toasters, curling irons, hair dryers, space heaters, etc.
I must admit that I have only mildly heeded these warnings, until recently. We finally got to see a near disaster, first hand.
Unloading boxes of misc. for our recently purchased place in AZ, I found a rather sophisticated looking hair dryer (Vidal Sassoon/1600 Watt), which appeared to be clean and in good shape. It even had a circuit breaker built into the power cord. However, there were no marks on the sliding switch, indicating "off/high/low." Guessing, I slid the switch to the center, expecting to find the "off" position. I plugged it in - nothing. Good. I temporarily hung it on the towel rack, then turned around to see what else I could find.
Within ten seconds, my wife screamed, and I turned around to see 6" high flames coming out of the unit. I grabbed it and winged it out onto the verandah. Fortunately, the black smoke residue left on the wall cleaned up - no harm done.
Had I plugged it in, then left the room, I have no doubt that instead of cleaning up smoke residue, we would have been fighting a fire. Had we left the townhouse at the time, we probably would have returned to a destroyed unit, which hopefully, wouldn't have taken others with it.
Pretty scary stuff. Even scarier is that the built-in circuit breaker apparently didn't do anything. Later, I took the dryer apart, just to see if I could determine why it failed. Ha! Diagnosis: Innards fried/melted beyond recognition. The only conclusion I could make was that it was "well done."
Just thought I'd pass this episode along, for those of you who have never considered unplugging small appliances, when not in use.
Unc