There are failure conditions that are not immediately catastrophic. The reasoning being that if you come home after a work day (or even better, after coming bac

There are failure conditions that are not immediately catastrophic. The reasoning being that if you come home after a work day (or even better, after coming back from your coffee down the street) and see that a device malfunctioned you will attend to it. As opposed to leaving it plugged in and turned on for weeks while you are not there. A lot of devices will smoke before starting a fire, sometimes for quite a while until temps increase sufficiently for ignition. You would smell the smoke and figure out the culprit. Turning off everything is still worthwhile while you are away. This is just risk management. It is a small risk (maybe you have faulty appliances or house wiring? maybe you live in an earthquake or tornado area? etc) but the mitigation is also not very inconvenient. That said, if you can have a smoke detector pinging you (or a similar device - Amazon's cameras have a microphone that can alert you to alarms) it would be better. As you point out, stuff could happen while you are temporarily outside the home.