Bathroom Shaver Points

When Spouse fitted such a socket into our bathroom recently I wondered about this dual usage. He pointed out that he doesn't shave, nor do I. If anyone who does shave stays it's not going to harm the toothbrush thing to be unplugged.

The answer is: grow a beard!

Mary

They don't actually need to recharge every night - ours typically gets a recharge once a week. So how about just alternating which toothbrush you put on the charger?

On 24 Apr 2006 01:41:11 -0700 someone who may be snipped-for-privacy@scannex.co.uk wrote this:-

Any particular reason for having two? Many families manage with one and changing the heads.

Not as far as I know. Such a thing would be dangerous.

There are various standards in Europe. You might find one that fits, perhaps, but why use one?

As an aside, a shaver point in a bathroom should be of the type with an isolating transformer. These are limited to 20 W (20 VA, strictly).

I havent charged my Oral B for about 2 months! It gets the 2min cycle everyday. I am surprised just how long it keeps going!

Tim..

No. You can't use two devices off an isolation transformer and retain the same safety. Say both were metal cased and one developed a short to case from say L1. This is still safe, as there is no current flow through the body as no reference to earth. Now you plug a second device in via an adaptor. It develops a short from L2 to case. Touch both and you get the full 240 volts. With individual isolation transformers you could touch both cases with this fault in safety.

That's the theory - although such an event would be most unlikely in practice.

snipped-for-privacy@scannex.co.uktyped

My toothbrush lasts for about a fortnight after a single charge, as does my partner's. There are no shaver points in our bathroom.

There is no need to keep toothbrushes on charge all the time, wasting electricity.

Charge each toothbrush once a week. One socket will easily suffice.

I think the electricity use would be negligable, but giving the toothbrushes periodic full discharge and recharge, rather than continueoulsy charging, would improve battery performance.

Owain

Further more tooth brushes should be fully discharged every few months. I do mine, my son does not bother, he is on his third toothbrush while I am still on my first.

Does he leave it on continuous charge?

Modern ones are unlikely to have Ni-Cads so it shouldn't make much difference discharging it or not. But I wouldn't leave it on continuous as there's simply no need.

Broadback typed

I have thrown away two toothbrushes, despite fully discharging them fairly often.

They are not made to last...

The message from Owain contains these words:

Far less of a problem with more recent units with NiMh batteries rather than NiCds. NiMhs suffer from the "memory effect" far less than NiCds.

True. but occasional full discharge and recharge still recommended in the manual though.

Owain

... which themselves only suffer it when subject to repeated cycles of _exactly_ the same amount of partial discharge followed by recharge, as experienced on satellites plunged into the earth's shadow at regular intervals. That's where the memory effect was observed. The reason domestic NiCd batteries get knackered is _because_ they get fully discharged, causing the weaker cells in the battery to get reverse-charged by the stronger ones at the end of the discharge, which makes them lose even more capacity ... and so on in a vicious cycle.