DIYbanter - View Single Post

wrote:
I recently got a monthly electric bill for $180! The electric company
said this worked out to about 36KWh per day.

We use gas for water heating and furnace, electric for just about
everything else. We have just your regular appliances mostly new, more
enery-efficient stuff (washer/dryer, stove, dishwasher, fridge). The
only old appliances are our furnace (maybe 10 years) and our ovens
(probably 20+ years).

So I went home and did a circuit breaker test. It seems that most of
the draw is from a sub panel. I turned off individual fuses on the
subpanel to find that the living room was taking the most draw. It
turns out our tv / vcr / dvd and antenna were all taking about the same
amount which was a major contributor to load.

I'm still very suspicious (we don't watch *that* much tv) and I think
maybe the wiring is inefficient and particularly in the living room.
Does old wiring tend to be inefficient? Could there be some problem
with the wiring that is causing such draw? Even with the living-room
fuse off, the subpanel seems to draw a fair amount of power; could the
subpanel have bad wiring?

$180 for roughly 1100KWh? Spendy power company you got there...

Old wiring isn't significantly less efficient than new wiring...certainly not at
the current that normal household stuff draws. While I suppose it's remotely
possible that there is "near short" busily cooking a section of your house, it'd
be w-a-a-a-y down on my list of possibilities.

Lessee...36KWh per day works out to 'bout 1500W average draw. Seems a mite
high. Got any big loads that might be "on" continuously? Computer (and
monitor)? Outside floodlights or security lights? Furnace fan? Pond pumps
or sump pumps? Lots of lights get left on in the house?