Inefficient home wiring?
 

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?

In article .com,
wrote:

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

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.

You are on the right path, but need to keep going. While
you have everything else switched off at the breaker box
or the fuses pulled, make sure you still see this high load
on this one remaining circuit. Next, pull the plug on items
one at a time to see which item is causing the load. One
big clue is that it will be the one that is hot since it
is drawing enough power to run a hair dryer. My suspicion
is that you will pull all of your plug-in devices, and still
have the load. I am betting that there is something that
you forgot that is attached to this circuit, like a freezer
in the garage or outdoors flood lights.

If there is an electrical problem, you may want to call
for an electrician right away. A 1500 watt unknown load
could be a wiring problem, and that much heat can cause
a fire. Then again, if this has been going on, you should
have burned down by now, so that isn't likely after all.

-john-

--
================================================== ====================
John A. Weeks III 952-432-2708
Newave Communications http://www.johnweeks.com
================================================== ====================

I assume that you very first step was to verify your meter readings
with the bill and that all reading are actual and not estimated. A TV
and a VCR just don't take much. If you can't get that one circuit to
zero you better cut the breaker at least when you are sleeping or away.

Wouldn't be at all unusual in Southern California. You can run up to
18-cent kilowatt-hours pretty quickly in SDG&E territory.

But it sounds like either an estimated bill or the OP has missed a big
load somewhere. Several hundred watts just doesn't leak across old
wiring.

--
Chris Green

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.

On Fri, 07 Jan 2005 21:07:39 GMT, someone wrote:


What kind of test did you do? How did you measure current?

I don't think he has any testing eq - probably by watching the meter
spin???

Obviously, it can't be "inefficient" wiring. Something is drawing the
power. That power is either making heat or doing other mechanical
work like pumping water. As none of us has seen his house and what eq
is in it, we only know what he is telling us is in there. No gutter
heating cable/tape plugged in, no electric snow melter in the
sidewalk, no tankless HW, no freezer, etc etc we don't know.

-v.



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