wrote in message
oups.com...
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?


A TV normally use 100 watts, 10 hours a day would be only 1KW. Why does your
antenna draw power (motorized?) ? TV / vcr / dvd and antenna (?) are not
normally big power users. An electric dryer, electric range/oven or large
freezer would normally be the big power users. What was your daily power
usage on previous bills ? I agree with the other posters that if your
wiring alone was using that much power you would have burned down the house
by now. Some device is using that power and you need to isolate it by
process of eleimination.