Cook Up a Safe Thanksgiving

Count Amps While Counting Your Blessings

If your house is the gathering spot this Thanksgiving, electricity is not likely to be the top thing on your mind. However, prepping a feast for family and guests can take a shocking turn if electrical safety is not part of the meal plan.

Thanksgiving is the peak day each year for home kitchen fires, according to the National Fire Protection Association. Burning the turkey is the usual culprit on comedy shows, but fire in the kitchen is not a laughing matter and isn’t always the fault of a bad cook. Instead, a cooking-related fire can be caused by simply overloading your electrical outlets.

Preparing a large Thanksgiving dinner requires lots of oven and stovetop juggling, so cooks often add electric roaster ovens, air fryers, hot plates, slow cookers, and more to the mix. Using all these heat-producing appliances at once can wreak havoc on your electrical system — overloading and tripping circuit breakers and potentially damaging appliances.

When guests arrive with their own slow cookers in hand and need a place to plug in, hosts often drag out extension cords and multi-outlet splitters. Tempting as it may be to turn to these items, it’s never a good idea to use them in the kitchen, according to the NFPA.

Cooking appliances draw a sizable amount of electricity, about 10 to 12 amps for a roaster oven, 8 to 12 amps for a hot plate, and 2 to 6 amps for a slow cooker, according to the NFPA. The typical 120-volt kitchen outlet is rated at 20 amps, but the capacity of a regular extension cord is only about 13 amps. This means that unless you’re doing the math as you plug in your extra cooking appliances, that extension cord plugged into a 20-amp outlet could easily be overloaded. Without warning — since it won’t trip the circuit breaker like the hard-wired outlet would if overloaded — the result could be a fire.

Kitchens that adhere to the National Electrical Code will have ground fault circuit interrupter outlets installed along countertops. Don’t assume these will prevent all issues. Regular GFCI outlets are designed to protect against shocks, such as those caused by contact with liquids, not fires from overloaded circuits. The NFPA suggests determining which kitchen plugs are on what circuit and then splitting the appliances up accordingly to balance the total load.