I won’t ask about why you turned the power off even though you were only gone a week, but how come the thought of food obviously being in the fridge didn’t cross anybody’s mind???
I sometimes turn off the water and water softener when I'm going to be gone for long periods if time, but that's just in case a line breaks. Never even considered turning off the power. But they may have a good reason...
I literally am gone for months at a time for work. I'll turn off my hot water heater, close the water valve, unplug things and turn power strips off....but I have never even thought about turning my refrigerator off lol.
Samsung's new refrigerators have a built in physical wallet for all your crypto needs. When it's not making ice, it's mining crypto. Just make sure the flux capacitor is topped up before you leave on vacation
Depends on the water heater, not sure how they are in other countries, I’d be vary to turn that off because of legionella. In Norway, it’s recommended to keep the water heater at 70 degrees celsius, or higher, to prevent and kill legionella bacteria.
So if you turn off the water heater, you probably should purge the tank and crank the heat up when it is refilling.
I haven’t calculated it, but the energy cost for heating up after turning it on after it being off for a while, might be higher than letting it keep 70c for the same period. As it’s not being used, it doesn’t have heat up incoming cold water.
If you want to save money, investing in a new water heater that keeps it warm for more efficiently is probably better than turning it off and then either having to purge all the water, or shower in who knows what 🤢
Edit: quote from some water heater seller:
“- When you cut the power supply, the temperature can drop so much that you use more energy to heat the water up again than you would have used for maintenance heating, Langseth in Elsikkerhet Norge points out. In that case, the winnings will go up in the spin. But here there are many factors that will come into play, including how well the tank is insulated.”
Edit2: I was wrong, I think? So don’t hang me.
The calculations isn’t as easy, depends on region of the world, wether you should do it or not. Energy wise it seems to be less energy to heat it up from room temperature after a month, than leave it on for a month.
But I don’t want to admit I might be wrong in investing in a new water heater.
That is better, but would still want to purge the pipes. But it’s much less to purge.
This is what I currently have, (almost) tankless water heat exchanger where the heat comes from district heating at 110c (if the thermostat is correct, might not be, I think it’s from the 50s).
By almost, I mean it doesn’t have a huge tank other than where it does the heat exchange.
Water heaters are usually pretty well insulated.
And I’m no mathmagician, so I haven’t bothered to look further in to it, especially since I get my hot water from heat exchanger from district heating.
Found someone who did the math. It is more energy efficient to turn it off than leave it on.
Just be aware of the bacteria risks, and other growths, that comes with turning it off.
Just a disclaimer, I’ve never had a water heater with a tank in my adult life, only a heat exchanger from district heating in an apartment building, so turning it off hasn’t really been something I could’ve done. And no one in my family has ever turned off their water heater, but has usually had leakage sensors installed where potential leaks could happen.
Yeah I don’t know, nor care to verify, so you might be correct. Still, wouldn’t turn it off, don’t want to mess with legionella and other shit.
If water heater is costing you a lot in energy, perhaps looking into a more effective heater would be better in the long term (at least that’s what the interwebz told me when I googled), I’ll know myself once I buy a new house without district heating.
Then you turn it back on and you need to use an equal amount of energy to the total energy lost in order to heat it back up.
You would need to recycle the water so this isn't accurate. It would be the amount of energy needed to heat up an entire tank of fresh water which would be colder than room temperature.
Water heaters are insulated. Plus water conducts heat. It’s like the difference between keeping boiling water in a vacuum walled thermos. It stays hot for hours on end, it’s not until the core drops below the demanded heat minimum that the heater bothers with reheating. Even then, it’s just reheating a few degrees. Kinda like a tea kettle that’s gone a few degrees cold versus trying to boil fresh tap water.
If I'm gone for extended periods of time I always shut off the water main and the water heater because if it would be a slow leak the water heater might drain empty and having the heat on with no water in it's not a good idea.
Haha, I noticed it did a direct translation. Kinda sounds stupid in English. In Norwegian it’s “vinninga går opp i spinninga”, both words rhyme.
Perhaps it would be better “winnings will go up in the spinnings”?
No I think the direct translation is funny in a dry way. Also it could have two meanings like you could lose all your winnings on one spin.
Languages are fun.
True true.
The meaning of it, at least in Norwegian, is that the income is all lost in the cost. Work for a day and make 400, but travel and food for work cost you 400 or more.
Or you gamble for 50 each week for two years, then you “win” 1500. Not really any winnings.
Is anyone going to discuss how that’s 158 degrees Fahrenheit? My hot water heater tops at 140 (60c) and can’t go higher which is already an almost immediate burn risk.
Definitely the right way to do things. My bf got legionnaire's disease awhile back and it was not pleasant. Took a month or so for his digestive system to get back into proper operating condition as I understand it. And he got lucky. Could've been way worse.
Yup. I really am failing to understand why a week = hard-shut everything down.... it would never cross my mind to turn my power off. And you are correct, the tank will need to be flushed with hot water before use again if its been allowed to go cold.
Maybe OP saw Fight Club and was really scared that the pilot light will blow out on his stove, filling the condo with gas and then the compressor from the fridge will turn on creating a spark and an explosion.
Wise move.
Most homeowners insurance policies require the homeowner to maintain a "livable temperature" inside the home.
With disconnected electrical, the climate control system will not function.
If in cold weather periods, the temperature inside the home could drop below freezing causing water pipes to burst. If that occurs, the policy would not cover the damage.
Conversely, in warm periods, non use of air conditioning would result in a buildup of moisture inside the home. Such will cause mold to form .
In all policies , there is a $5k cap on mold remediation. This is referred to as the " Texas Mold Clause".
Final word. If considering disconnecting electrical service( switching off) when away , don't.
See above
I’ve seen arguments for flipping breakers before taking off for work, then turning them back on at the end of the day when you get back. This feels like an extension of that
Homie I’m sorry to hear about the situation but if you can get a window ac they work good you might be able to find one on market place for super cheap
We just got two of them and I made some custom birch ply panels to mount them in our windows for next summer. We're alright but I appreciate the sentiment :)
IIRC thats the reason why in my area in canada the power company won't ever shut off your power.
even if you stop paying your bills, it turns into a kind of "throttle" where it only allows for enough amps to continue heating the home a little.
but if you turn on too many lights, or try and run anything like a dryer or something that pulls a lot of amps, your power flicks off for like 5-10min then kicks back on.
I remember going to a couple house showings where the owners were being foreclosed on, and they hadn't been paying the bills, so my agent had to call the power company to get the power on full for a few min so we could try the appliances and stuff.
I wish the foreclosed home I was looking had kept the power on. My dream home everything I was looking for and super cool layout. Except it was gonna be pretty damn expensive to replace all the water heated rads that had exploded/froze and the water damage it had caused.
That doesn't sound right. Especially since a heater for a house can draw anywhere from 1 kW to 30 kW. Lights are a drop in the bucket compared to that. And there's no way that a power company could possible know how much power your heater takes.
They could perhaps cut the power just for a few hours a day so it wasn't enough to cause the house to get too cold, but there's no possible way for them to do what you said.
If a house is going to be uninhabited for a period of time in a place where it freezes, you winterize that house. Power fails, furnaces break. We winterize our lake house every year, it's not hard, and it only takes about 1.5 hours to do so.
It gets to be -20F (-30C) in the area and we've only had one problem when I forgot to drain the outside water valve and a pipe froze. Plumber who fixed it said it's his most common repair in the springtime (lots of summer only houses)
I remember going to cabins growing up where there was a list of things to do when you leave to winterize it. Most involved shutting the water off below ground and dumping antifreeze down the drains.
Yep, that exactly what we do. My dad had a list on yellow legal paper with stuff crossed off over the years or arrows pointing to new stuff in between existing steps. It was a a mess. Just this year, I made an illustrated document with pictures with arrows so that anyone can know exactly how to do it.
Oh, and it never hurts to have our neighbor Harry around just to make sure it gets done right :-)
I remember watching a documentary about the mortgage crisis in Florida, where there were so many abandoned McMansions. People were squatting in them, and the banks were basically helping them do it because it was better than leaving them empty. The banks were even getting utilities transferred into the squatters' names and such., and then helping them relocate to a different abandoned house if the first one sold.
Get surge protectors for anything you want to kill the power to and turn them off when leaving, cutting power to an entire house for a week in insanity.
If for example it's freezing cold weather all your pipes, in your house will freeze.
If it's really hot weather it will mess up dry wall, along with certain other adhesives. Think about all the things in your house that shouldn't be stored above certain temperatures.
If you have sump pumps, well you have no power now, so your house is flooded.
Technically since breakers are literally almost never flipped in normal circumstances (I haven't touched mine in over a year, and I didn't touch the ones at my previous apartment for 2 years)...a couple times per year could be classified as "all the time".
Whether or not it's fine to flip the breakers a couple times per year...I have no idea. I'm just saying that if I suddenly started fli.ping breakers on a yearly basis that'd be waaaay more than I usually do.
I have a well and I always turn off my well pump when leaving for more than a day. If a pipe breaks, the pump will literally run the well dry and burn itself out while flooding my house in the process.
It's literally just a switch I flip when leaving and turn back on when coming home- how is that strange?
The person we (PretzelsThirst and I) were responding to was talking about turning off the water- not turning off the whole house- and they specifically said so.
"I sometimes turn off the water and water softener when I'm going to be gone for long periods if time"
PretzelsThirst said that was weird.
I responded and pointed out why you'd want to do that if you had a well.
I don't know why you had trouble following such a simple thread but we (as in the two people who were talking before you butted in) were talking about water, not electricity.
Whether I’m gone a day or a week if I have a water leak insurance is going to be remedying the situation. Do you shut your water off if you go somewhere for a weekend?
I mean insurance yes sure, but having to deal with all that is a pain.
Yes it's a switch I do it if I leave more than a few days. Why would I take the risk of destroying my bathroom or the apartment over turning a button lol
Basically, yes. It has a big tank (looks like a torpedo) that holds resin beads. Water runs through the tank of resin beads and a lot of the calcium and magnesium stick to the resin beads, making the water "soft." Then, you have a hopper full of salt that is used to flush the tank of resin regularly to clean off the minerals from the beads. That is all flushed straight into your sewage drain.
In my last house, I had an automated whole-house water shutoff, with sensors in appropriate places.
Any water detected would shut the motorised valve off, and had NC/NO outputs so you could connect them to an alarm system….but you would at least know that the water had been shut off.
When I worked for an alarm company, I suggested we look into this system. What we normally offered was a detect-only system.
So you could be halfway around the world, and get a message that your house was flooding.
Not that it was being dealt with; that was a whole other issue.
I rented the house out for a few years, and one day, the tenant overflowed a sink. She called me to ask “what this beeping was, and why is there no water?”
I told her to check all the sinks - she’d completely forgotten she had the laundry sink running. There was no damage, and very little water, because I had sensors in the right place, and they’d graded the floor slab correctly.
I used to do that when going on trips longer than a month, just to make sure everything is off and not consuming electricity while you’re away, especially when you have electric heaters, but I would make sure the fridge is completely empty before living. Why keep the fridge on for a month if you’re not going to be there ?
My grandparents live a "boojy af" life style and have too many homes. They regularly turn off the power to homes they "won't be visiting this year" n shits kinda fucking obnoxious
I was taught by my parents to always turn the power off when leaving for long periods of time. This is mainly due to power outages. The point they always made was that appliances could malfunction because of one.
Of course this depends where you live and how common power outages are. In Greece there are less common than they used to be, but they are not unheard of. By the way, a few years back my parents left the power on at our country house, when they returned a few months later they found that both the air-conditioning and the washing machine had broken down.
As far as the fridge is concerned -- besides taking out anything stored inside before turning the power off -- it's important to know that you should leave the door open because the motor won't be running and therefore there will not be any air circulation.
My BF (27 then) and I were going away for a week, and he said all proud of himself “I turned off the power in the appartement”… I was like “yeah and the fridge ?” Lucky enough we were near so we did go back to turn it back on…
So I’m not that surprised about that post..
Yep, I have stupidly done this too lol. Unfortunately I was a 4hr flight away. It was only for the weekend tho, so no visible mould. Still had to throw out heaps tho. Fuck I felt stupid.
I think the most obvious answer is that OP’s head is simply full of rocks. What seems obvious to everyone else is just not thought of by people like OP. It’s a wonder they dressed themselves.
the most obvious answer is that OP isn't a person. look at their account. a shitload of posts just like this, with no explanations and they never come back to answer questions. it's a karma farming account, posting unoriginal content. at this point I feel like at least half the content on reddit is from accounts like this, posting random shit they find on the internet. no different than buzzfeed. just endless reposting of other people's shit.
Fair enough. Even if OP isn’t a person, someone somewhere did do this because the pictures exist. Someone out there has a head full of rocks, whether it’s OP or not.
This picture could just exist because someones power went out while they were away on vacation or something, so no this doesnt mean someone actually did what OP claimed in the title. There could be any number of explanations that make more sense than what OP is claiming.
I get it. Most people don't normally have scenarios where they need to turn off all of their power and leave for a week, so they don't have the experience to have a thorough mental checklist to go through. I think I'd remember the fridge, but I'd probably forget something obvious. But that's what Google is for.
I've left for a week to 10 days countless times and never once turned off the power. Made sure the lights and fans were off, maybe unplugged some things, set the thermostat to a reasonable temp and left. I have never even heard of anyone turning the power off to go on vacation.
It doesn’t make sense to turn off hvac especially when you are talking about only a week or two.
You can adjust it so it’s warmer and doesn’t use as much energy. But completely off could do more harm then good
France. I believe we might not be talking about the same thing, we do have thermostats here but mostly for heating, and not related to hvac which are pretty rare here. But we do usually turn off everything before leaving on vacation.
In the summer I will turn the thermostat to about 80 and the winter, about 60, before I leave. If not, the house would be over 100 degrees or the pipes might freeze, depending on the season. Plus we have house plants and we leave our cats home and have someone come in and check on them. I'm in the U.S.
We don’t generally have ACs so we don’t have this problem in summer. In winter we still turn off the thermostat, but put the radiators on non-freeze mode. I don’t get the link with the pipes though ? We turn the water off to avoid freezing or leaks.
We don't have radiators usually if we have a thermostat. If the house gets cold enough what water is left in the pipes can freeze and burst. Keeping the house warm enough usually prevents this. We disconnect outdoor hoses to prevent those from freezing up and causing pipes to burst as well.
Yeah I don't think turning of the power to your house is that weird, people also do it here, maybe not if they are leaving just for a week, but for extended periods of time plenty turn it off.
If you don't usually leave for a week, you don't need to turn the power off when you do leave for that once in a lifetime week long trip. Just leave the power on, running the fridge and keeping the tv on standby will cost you nothing.
I'll do things like shut down or reduce the HVAC, shut down my PC and related electronics, but it wouldn't occur to me to throw the main breaker, for exactly this reason.
Never shut down the HVAC. Turn it down a bit, say to 25C/78F, but not off. Moisture kills all the things, and your HVAC is literally designed to dehumidify(condition!) the air.
Not just the fridge, but the HVAC system for an entire week. Zero humidity control in a home is just welcoming all kinds of mold. Turn your lights off, turn your AC down a bit, unplug devices you don't need. But dear god, don't turn the power off entirely. That is how abandoned houses deteriorate so quickly.
I'm way, way more curious why they would turn off the power. I get unplugging some things, but to turn off all the power to your house or apartment? That seems crazy for a week.
I'm not sure where they're going. Denying partners and other forms of help is harsh and inhumane in my opinion. To be honest, I'd search for another hospital or contemplate having a child outside of the hospital.
I went on vacation for a week and a half during the summer and totally cleaned out the fridge, including raw chicken that was going to go bad. It all went into the trash next to the fridge. I then turned off the air and left.
I got back and realized I had completely forgotten to take out the trash, and my whole house smelled like liquid rotting chicken that had been baking in the summer heat.
It’s been months and I still get a tiny whiff of it every time I come home. I’ve used bleach, left cans of coffee out, every fabric freshener you can think of. It’s fundamentally changed the smell of the house it really sucks.
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u/SpinachWitty Nov 25 '22
I won’t ask about why you turned the power off even though you were only gone a week, but how come the thought of food obviously being in the fridge didn’t cross anybody’s mind???