Thursday, February 26, 2015

Help finding a big power drain electricians


I hope that I'm posting in the right place, but I'm running out of ideas.


I live in central Texas and I have a fairly substantial electrical drain or load or vampire at my house. I've eliminated the heating/AC by turning off the circuit breaker and that didn't take care of the issue. Most of the times when this electrical load is present it's at night when I'm asleep, sometimes it happens during the day when I'm not home. This has made it really difficult to track and at first I thought I had an electricity thief. Also this does not always happen, it's some days and not others. I have contacted to the electrical company and scheduled to have the meter checked and to look for tampering. I think they checked it monday, since when I got home that day all my clocks were reset.


A pic of a graph of power usage through the day when the spike happens: http://ift.tt/1FxJeLv


I live alone, and I don't have a whole lot of stuff that's on or in standby. 1 TV that's off, 1 PC that's off, my cable modem stays on, oven is plugged in and has a clock, microwave doing the same, and a refrigerator. My water heater is electrical, but the time frame that the load is happening doesn't match up with when it would be heating water, and I also don't think it pulls quite this much power and on top of that, the time frame seems too long.


I've had entire days where this load does not come up and with me playing on the computer, taking a shower, and having the heat on (with the heat turned down really low, just enough to keep me from freezing) and I'll use very little power, maybe 5-6kwh for the whole day.


I've looked for evidence of tampering myself and haven't found any, my circuit breaker box is locked up, and the only exterior outlet I have made cracking noises like it hadn't been touched in a long time when I checked it.


Any ideas as to what this could be? also I am not totally sure what kind of amperage it would take to pull this kind of load, and since I'm not totally sure how to convert this to amperage, so I can eliminate anything that simply isn't capable of pulling that much amperage.







Submitted February 26, 2015 at 08:56PM by blharg http://ift.tt/1vCc3qi electricians

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