*** Check your power cord first, wiggle it from the plug down to the connection to the rice cooker. It could also be bad wire near the plug, squeeze and giggle if you see light goes off and on, then it’s the cord. Just replace it 🙂

Short answer: For old Tiger rice cooker with a recoil power cord, most likely the recoil mechanism is defective due to aging. You can try pulling it in and out, chances are it will work for a few more times if lucky then longer. The fix is to unscrew that mechanism and lift the four pins up that connect to the power. What happen is over time the pin get worn out or doesn’t make contact properly. The alternative might be just by pass the recoil, basically remove the recoil mechanism.

I have an old Tiger rice cook that have this issue. This is a very good quality rice cooker by Tiger, however there is a flaw with the recoil power cord model. If you use it frequently of kept on recoil, pull in and out, chances are one day it will break, meaning it will not make good contact with the pins. You can play around with the recoil power cable pulling in out, yank it a few times, and you might make good contact to make it work again, but it will be totally useless one day. So it’s better to just fix it. You can buy new one for about $100, but save some money by disabling the recoil mechanism. Be careful, always unplug and work in open space where you know for sure it’s not plug in. Otherwise you can get killed with electricity.

*** One other thing to keep in mind is that, I don’t recommend you to bypass the recoil mechanism completely, as the recoil mechanism have something similar to a resistor of some kind to regulate electricity power going into the rice cooker, it’s also a safety mechanism I believe. What you do is just take the recoil mechanism out, which is that roll metal thingie, just take that out and throw it away. So you no longer have a recoil, but just a long power cord.