if you have an issue with something powered by electricity, why do you need to count till 5/10 when you unplug/turn off power before restarting it?
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Officially it’s because of capacitors…but a lot of the time it’s because we don’t trust someone to actually turn it off or unplug it. They wiggle the plug and call it good; by telling someone to leave it unplugged for 10 seconds, we know they probably actually pulled the power cable out of the device.
Electronics often have things that hold a charge called capacitors. They’re like little pockets that hold energy temporarily and are normally periodically filled and drained and are used for all sorts of things. When you power something off, some of them can take several seconds to discharge. That whole time they might still be powering some part of the circuit preventing it from resting. Most electronic devices don’t require waiting 5-10 seconds, but it doesn’t hurt to take a few seconds to be sure
When you wait for 5-10 seconds before turning on an electronic device, it allows the capacitors in the device to discharge fully. Capacitors store electrical energy, and by waiting for a few seconds, you ensure that any residual charge in the capacitors dissipates. This is important because some devices have components that may be sensitive to sudden power surges or fluctuations. By waiting, you give the device a brief pause to stabilize and ensure a smoother start when you turn it back on.
A few reasons:
* Some circuits hold onto power for a while and need a few seconds to “turn off” completely. A bit like pressing brakes on your car to stop.
* Some microchips need time to decide that your are resetting them, and will clear their settings before they power down entirely.
* Some devices are really sensitive to being powered back on and their protection circuits might not arm correctly if power is restored too quickly.
* Disk drives take time to stop spinning.
Newer computers are less sensitive to these issues and often can power down entirely within a second. But waiting out the 5-10 seconds costs very little time and ensures you are gentle to the device 👍
Since the rational answers have been covered, I would like to also explain the tech-gremlins. As time goes on gremlins attach to and breed in your electronics and eventually it gets so they can’t function very well. Like ticks. A few ticks is bad but dealable. A bunch of ticks serious problems. So when you turn off the electricity they feed on, they leave and go somewhere else. If you just restart it they have no problem. This is also why slapping an electronic sometimes helps. It jiggles them loose, and it takes them a bit to latch back on.
With stuff like modems and routers, it’s not just about the capacitors but also all the stuff that’s connected to it.
Your wifi problem might be partially caused by a problem on your computer’s end. Turning the router off long enough that your computer notices its lost its connection might clear whatever problem that is when the computer does whatever it needs to do to reconnect. The guy from the phone company doesn’t know or care what’s actually broken on your computer’s end, but telling you to turn off the router and wait a minute is a way to rule out that whole class of problems.
ELI5:
There’s these little *batteries* called *capacitors* that hold electricity. The *capacitor, like a battery,* is like a Jug of water with a hole on the bottom.
When the device is plugged into the wall, the jug of water gets filled with a *liiiiittle* more water than it loses, but when the device gets unplugged, the Jug loses it’s water not all at once, but rather slowly.
In this case, the jug is the capacitor, the water is the flow of electricity.
Think of it like a bottle of poison. Poison is electricity. The bottle is full. You have to wait until the bottle is empty so you don’t poison yourself or the bottle that contain it.
Some old things like Cathode Ray Tube monitors has an extra storage area that needed to be emptied also before you could service them.
Most electric devices have a few tiny but very fast discharging and charging battery devices in them called capacitors. These capacitors can take a brief moment to discharge which in turn fully kills the power in the device.
Often times you can get away with a quick power cycle, mostly because the problem is in perhaps the application code and not the underlying system but capacitors don’t only help to start a system but also to regulate the system.
Electricity is often pretty consistent, but it has variances where power might dip veeeery slightly below what is expected coming into your house (or worse, exceed).
So we use capacitors to not only help jump-start energy expensive components (where they don’t use as much once started; ie. Your AC fan for instance) or to help stabilize flow.
Because it has parts called capacitors that act like batteries. When you unplug a device they are still charged up a little, so to fully reset the device all the power should drain out. So leave it unplugged for a little while (I tend to hit the power button a few times while it’s off to try and drain it faster too) before plugging it back in.
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