Fire Risks
There is a risk of fire from devices in standby mode. There are reports of televisions, in particular, catching fire in standby mode.
Before the development of modern semiconductor electronics it was not uncommon for devices, typically television receivers, to catch fire when plugged in but switched off, sometimes when fully switched off rather than on standby. This is much less likely with modern equipment, but not impossible. Older cathode-ray tube display equipment (television and computer displays) had high voltages and currents, and were far more of a fire risk than thin panel LCD and other displays.
Contributing factors for electrical fires include:
- Damp environments
- Lightning strikes affecting building wiring
- Age of the appliance—older appliances are less well designed for safety, and may have deteriorated
Read more about this topic: Standby Power
Famous quotes containing the words fire and/or risks:
“Tell a man whose house is on fire to give a moderate alarm; tell him to moderately rescue his wife from the hands of the ravisher; tell the mother to gradually extricate her babe from the fire into which it has fallen; but urge me not to use moderation in a case like the present.”
—William Lloyd Garrison (1805–1879)
“The amount of it is, if a man is alive, there is always danger that he may die, though the danger must be allowed to be less in proportion as he is dead-and-alive to begin with. A man sits as many risks as he runs.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)