Works for Me Wednesday: Multiple Uses for an Appliance Timer

When I was growing up and we would go out of town, my parents always put one of these guys on our lamps. And all I remember about them was being totally frustrated when we got home and I would try to turn on a lamp! I could somehow never figure out how to switch it from being on the timer to just working like a regular socket. (Obviously you can just unplug it, and plug the lamp back into the wall, but that cowed me, for whatever reason.)

Fast forward to my married life. Andy and I have so far lived in fairly small apartments, and they’ve also been on the top floor. As such, we found that we didn’t really need to turn our heat on in the winter, because we would get ambient heat from the floors below us, and were well insulated by apartments around us. We would just use a space heater to get whatever room we were in up to a comfortable temperature. But at night it would sometimes get a little cold, so he devised a plan to put what I always thought of as a lamp timer on a space heater to have it come on periodically. It works!

We’ve discovered that the appliance timer can also help my basic Crockpot work more like a more expensive programmable model. This is really useful for recipes that say it should only cook for, say, 3 hours. I can set all the ingredients up before I leave for work but then set the timer to turn the crockpot on at a certain time and shut off at a certain time so that I don’t have to worry about my recipe drying out or burning.

My one piece of advice is to remind you that, if you do this, you have to leave the appliance switched to “on” so that once the timer starts emitting electricity it will function. It’s not like I know this from experience or anything…

I’m linking up to Works for Me Wednesday at WeAreThatFamily.com!