A recent video about firefighting knowledge went viral on the Internet, and this video truly documented a fire. Because the mobile phone charging did not unplug the charger in time, resulting in a fire in the house after the owner left, although the fire extinguished with all its might, but it has caused property damage, the whole room is unbearable to see, the only fortunate thing may be that there are no casualties. Will it really have such serious consequences for forgetting to unplug the phone charger? After all, the video in front of you is an example, but it is not to the extent that some marketing numbers are talking about it.
First of all, there is a question that many people are concerned about, is the mobile phone charger plugged in there, and does it consume power without charging? How much electricity is consumed? The answer, of course, is yes. And now there are actually relevant specifications can be queried, the mainland issued the communication industry standard YD/ T 1591-2009 has a clear specification for this "mobile communication terminal power adapter and charging / data interface technical requirements and test methods", which requires that the power of the charger in standby state can not be higher than 150 mW. It shows that the charging head also consumes power when it is not working, and there are relevant specifications to tolerate this phenomenon.
Whether the 150mW consumed out of thin air can cause a fire depends mainly on the safety of the charging head. Some popular science content will tell you that as long as there is power consumption, there will be heat, and more heat accumulation will cause fire. But this argument forgets one thing, the heat generated is to be dissipated by the heat dissipation structure, and only the heat accumulated continuously can heat up the equipment. For the charger, the heat generation is the highest when it is close to the peak power, and the entire heat dissipation structure is also designed for this high heat generation scenario, and the standby power is less than 10% of the peak power, and there is generally no heat storage.
On the other hand, some people may question that the industry specification requirements are not higher than 150mW, so did the manufacturer do it? According to the tests given by the previous charging head network, the well-known brands we can think of have basically done it, and some may not have done it, but the vast majority of them can even be much lower than the industry norms, such as Xiaomi's 33W fast charging standby power is only 17mW, and it is not the lowest in the list. And we will find that the power of the charger seems to have little to do with the standby power.
As for this fire event, from the result of combustion, there is a high probability that there is a short circuit phenomenon, which is much higher and more serious than the probability of heat storage and fire of the charging head itself. I believe that junior high school physics should have talked about why short circuit fires are very serious - because the high temperature of the line caused by short circuits will cause the wires of the whole house to burn, and the fire will spread to the whole house with the wires in an instant, and even the whole house will catch fire at the same time. For a charging head that is not up to standard in quality, it is much easier to short-circuit than to slowly accumulate heat.
There is another question, why can't the charging head be completely powered off when it is not charging? In fact, this power is called standby power, some of our commonly used products, such as computers, also have standby power, usually in the shutdown state is not higher than 500 milliwatts, that is, 0.5 watts, unless you turn off the switch on the power supply at the back of the chassis. In reality, many home appliances, such as TVs, microwave ovens, air conditioners, etc., "shutdown" is actually in standby, and their standby power is much higher than the charging head.
The emergence of the standby state, on the one hand, is to reduce the number of power switches, which also reduces the number of times the equipment components are affected by surges and prolongs the life. On the other hand, it is also convenient for our lives. When we turn on the switch at will, the circuit system of various home appliances can respond at the fastest speed. Especially when we pick up the remote control and press it, the TV or air conditioner can move in response to the sound, and if there is no standby state but directly turn off the power, guess what? Therefore, the emergence of standby is actually the result of deliberate efforts in the industry.
To sum up, according to statistics, more than half of the fires in real life are related to electricity consumption, so "electric fire" is indeed worth vigilance. But if it is not to pull the gate to the whole house or plug one by one, many electrical appliances in our lives are actually in standby and are slowly consuming electricity. In this case, why bother with an extra charging head?
However, from the perspective of energy saving, unplugging and completely turning off the power supply is of great benefit, although it does not have much to do with fire prevention, we still recommend unplugging the plug to cut off the power.