SewTired wrote:Great information, but I wanted to add that another way to prevent your switch from wearing out is to plug it into a power strip and leave the machine set to ON. Then just use the power strip to turn the machine on and off. It's way cheaper to buy a new power strip than the expense and fuss fixing the switch, especially if you have poor vision or can't fix it yourself. Since we plug most electronics into a surge protector anyway, and they all have switches, it is a nonproblem.
That's a bad idea for many CPAP machines because they record your nightly therapy data after you hit the start/stop button. You might lose some of your data if you just cut the power instead of powering off with the button.
On many machines, If you turn off the power, you may have to push the start button to get it to start running anyway.
On ResMed machines, they run the fan a bit until the humidifier cools down. This may be to keep humidity from seeping back into the blower unit.
Power on/off cycles are also something of a bad thing for many pieces of electronics. The power on/off cycles can cause extra stress and shorten the lifetime if done too many times. Pulling the power is different from pushing the start/stop button.