Kimera, I see some good detective work in this thread. I think the next imperative is to have the meter cabinet unlocked, unplug everything, and see if there’s any activity with your meter. Unfortunately, you may have to do this several times, at irregular intervals. Seems to me that a neighbor stealing your power could be the issue. Someone suggested that they could have tapped into an outlet at the back, but that’s not necessarily how it would be done. Anywhere along the run of wire your neighbors could tap in, and the electricians would never be able to spot it without opening up the walls. What’s the construction of your building like? Are the walls just drywall? it would be very easy for your neighbors to remove drywall on their side, find a wire serving your apartment, tap into it, and then replace the drywall.
It’s probably somewhere around 1kW, but unless it’s being used for several hours every day it’s not going to make a dent in the 36kWh/day the OP is seeing.
No, I think Una Persson got it right:
(You just thought that blue glow was the computer monitor…)
Yep. Get the cabinet open- it’s your right. Unplug everything. See if little dial still going around.
However, with the heat the way it is, I strongly suspect A/C usage, no matter what your roomies say.
Still, your bill isn’t very high for 4 dudes.
I think your point is spot on here and it’s possible that there was a measurement error beforehand that has now been corrected. The avgerage prior amount of $30.+/- monthly seems unnaturally low for a small apt with 4 users in CA even discounting then AC issue…
kaylasdad99, you were right, I read the oven light rather than the microwave. Here is a picture of the energy usage of the microwave. However, I only included it because we use it as a clock for the living room/kitchen and my roommate cooks breakfast in it for about 5 minutes at the most. I also do not know how to unplug it, so it’s one of the few things that is always plugged in. I did a careful sweep of the apartment and realized that I had forgotten to include the modem, the router, and a small fishtank. These are unchanged from the previous years. The small fishtank uses this filter (the 10i one) which is a bit much for one fish but I am too lazy to change it.
My roomie’s max is 450. She says that she isn’t using even half of the power even when she games. She doesn’t have a fancy screen saver, it just goes black after a short while. She’s not even here most of the time, she works for about 10 hours a day during the weekday and spends a lot of the nights and weekends at her boyfriend’s apartment or out at a party. I’ve seen her game for about 15 hours since she moved in here. I also want to mention that the high bill was from June 18 to July 17 and my roomie moved in July 1st. The previous roomie had moved out before my current roomie moved in.
I took a pic of my air conditioner’s information. I don’t know how to read it myself, but a person told me that my airconditioner can max run at 18kwh, based on the calculation of 230 volts x 80 watts. He said that it would have to run full power for at least one hour per day to produce the extra kwhs.
I don’t know what kind of water heater our apartment uses. They are locked up, along with the power meter. I will ask at the office when I go in later today. I really want to do the “shut off all power and see if the meter still runs thing” but I have to wait for the guys from edison to come out. They have already lied to me twice, so I wouldn’t be surprised if they made a mistake and are covering it up. They kept telling me that they didn’t not have the key to read the meters, the apartment managers did, while the apartment managers told me that edison did. My apartment manager said that she’d get edison to come out here, I just hope that they come while I am actually here so I can see it for myself. They also gave me a number that they claimed was for an electrician but it turned out to a be a company that gave energy saving tips which I had Already Done and told the woman that I did. Part of the reason I got so stressed out about this when I posted this OP, was due to their lying.
My next door neightbor has been gone somewhere for the last few weeks. He’s got a note sticking out of his door which I doubt he is replacing every time he leaves. I wonder if my downstairs neighbors have moved out because no one answers now and the blinds are always pulled so that you can’t see in the apartment unless you get very close. Normally, they leave the blinds slightly open. My immediate upstairs neighbor hasn’t been home when I’ve tried to talk to them recently, and the apartment to their right is aparently vacant as well. A lot of people here are immigrants and/or students and go home for the summer. The only reason my two male roommates didn’t go back to their home countries was that one is still teaching tennis and the other is taking summer classes. The walls are pretty thin, I guess just made of drywall.
The thing is, during that 7 period day between the initial read and reread, I was watching the appliances, including the air conditioner, like a hawk. If my roomies were sneaking the air conditioner in, then wouldn’t they have stopped after I mentioned the high rate of billing before those seven days? It would be a massive conspiracy. My schedule is irregular - I don’t know when I am going to be home from work and they don’t know when I am at work a lot of the times. My one roommate is so short on cash, he was asking for his security deposit back already so he can visit his sick girlfriend.
Okay, I just managed to talk to the head Manager. He told me that the water heaters run on gas and that they take care of the bill for that. I later confirmed that with the maintenance guy in charge of the building. He also said that his minions were wrong and his office has the key to the meters as does the electric company. He said that they just aren’t allowed to mess with the devices, only the electric company is allowed to come out and turn off the power to my apartment and see if the meter still climbs. I also seperately asked both him and the maintenance guy if any electrical work had been done in any apartments in my whole complex. Both of them said that no work had been done.
I got the number of my meter from Edison. They refused to give it to me before, saying that I wouldn’t be able to read it because I wouldn’t know how to. The maintenance guy took me over to the meters and the door was unlocked when we went in. I will be checking the meter much more regularly if the door remains unlocked, which I requested of him. I want to try the “turn off everything and see if the meter still runs” but I’d prefer to do that with a company representative standing by. They were supposed to come yesterday, but they never showed. If they still have not come by to check out the situation in another few days, I will just do it myself and video tape it. The apartment manager and maintenance guy said that they (and me) weren’t allowed to touch it, or I would ask them to be there and watch.
Anyway, I did a reading of the meter (which had the apartment number written on it anyway) and found it to be 96273. The previous reading, done by the company, was 96141. I wrote the number down, not saying it aloud, and asked the maintenance guy to read it to me just in case I was reading it wrong. He read the exact same numbers that I had written down. This means that between 1 pm on the 25th, and right now, 2 pm of the 28th, 132 kwhs were used. 3 days, so 44kwh/day. It was not the air conditioning. I was home all day on the 25th and the 27th. We are searching for new roomies for next year, so I requested those days off of work in order to show the apartment to various applicants. On Wednesday, I was only out of the apartment for 5 hours and my roommates were gone during that time. One stayed at his girlfriend’s house that night, the other was at her boyfriend’s house, and the other didn’t get home until late. Furthermore, after people kept telling me that my roomies were sneaking the air conditioning, I moved the ticks ever so slightly apart and placed them in a particular spot. That way, I would notice if someone had played around with the unit. It was untouched. When the electricians had come to my apartment earlier, they checked out the AC which their device and they said it was working fine.
For those who claim that it is too low for 4 people, I checked the amount with people who live similar lifestyles in identical apartments and I found the numbers to be comparable. Besides, 30kwh/day for 30 days is 900 compared to our average usage of ~300. I doubt that the energy company would constantly underestimate us that much. If you don’t want to believe me, that’s fine. But I already checked this with 3 friends/coworkers in 3 different apartments that are owned by the same management group. It’s a combination of no washer/dryer, energy saving appliances, rare use of dishwasher, roommates often gone or only popping in and out, and using natural light instead of artificial as much as possible. The entire apartment is 950 square feet. The electric company also said that they didn’t do estimates when I asked them, I don’t believe them about a lot of things, but I believe them about that.
Last time I talked to them, the energy company was saying that they couldn’t do anything else. They said that they had checked their equipment and found it to be in working order. But it can’t be, this energy usage is just impossible for my apartment. MsRobyn had suggested to me to go to the California State Public Utilities Commission and if they don’t come out soon and seriously listen to what I have to say, then I will do that. Hopefully they will be able to help me.
I just thought of something else. This may sound like a silly question, but are you certain the bill is for one month? The reason I ask is because our power is through Los Angeles DWP and they bill on a two month cycle. That probably isn’t it in your case, but figured I’d throw that tidbit out there.
I’d do it anyhow, since it’s easy to do. With the water heater eliminated as a potential problem spot, and since you’re trying to be diligent about tracking this, we’re getting more and more into the “bad meter” or “un/intentional theft” territory IMO.
You’re using/losing a huge amount of power, more than I do to run the AC on my nearly 2000 square-foot house, run my servers, and do things like run the microwave, dishwasher, washer and dryer, etc. You’re correct to pursue this vigorously, even if cost wasn’t a problem, simply from the standpoint of finding out what’s going on.
Re: an earlier post, whoever told you your AC used that much energy read the label wrong, or didn’t know what they were talking about. That AC doesn’t use 18kW; I’m seeing a 1/3 hp motor listed (249W or 0.249kW) and I doubt the rest of the system gets to much more than 1kW, especially on an apartment-sized AC.
If the meter cabinet is still unlocked, I think the best thing to do first would be to start flipping breakers; I don’t see any particular reason to wait unless you’ve got some electronics you don’t want to turn off (like roommates’ computers). Even then you could turn off the other breakers if the circuits are labeled well. Flipping breakers is easy and fun, and even mostly* safe; might as well have fun now! It’s probably best to do this during the day; if the culprit is an air-conditioner, it will be working hardest during midafternoon and probably be harder to detect at night.
The hard part here is not seeing the power drain; the hard part is isolating it since it might be sporadic. (Did it turn off because I flipped the switch, or did it just decide to turn off on its own?) Air conditioners are sporadic loads, though it might be hot enough that they’re running near-continuously. So you’ll want to do both instantaneous and average measurements. Here’s what I’d do:
First figure out what circuits at your circuit-breaker box, if any, you’d like to keep on. Now go down to the meter and get a good estimate of the 1kWh dial position (the rightmost dial). Try to estimate to a fraction of a digit (e.g., if the pointer is 1/3 of the way between 7 and 8, call it 7.3). Also record the time, and get a feel for how fast the spinning wheel is turning (count seconds per revolution or something). You may want to read this to understand what you’re seeing and to turn this speed into a reasonable quantitative estimate of instantaneous power draw. Watch it for a few minutes if you can; see if the wheel speeds up or slows down very much. Now go back to your breaker box, and turn off any of the circuits you can be without for half an hour. (The fridge should be fine for that time as long as it’s left closed.) Listen as you turn off the breakers; if you hear a fan or compressor turning off, this might be a Clue (try to find out what the sound is, of course; see if it turns back on when you flip the breaker back, etc.; and of course remember what circuit that was). Write all of this down, unless your memory is a lot better than mine. If you can turn them all off (making sure the computers are nicely shut down first, etc.), then do them all one at a time and then turn the main one off, just because it’s so much fun to flip big-ole switches.
Now go back to the meter; see if the wheel has slowed down. If you find the right circuit, it should go from around 1 second per revolution (meter dependent; read the link above) to several seconds per revolution; this isn’t a subtle thing you’re looking for. Again, watch for a while to see if the speed changes. After half an hour or so, read the rightmost dial again. At 44kWh/day, or about 2kWh/h, the dial should be changing by about 1 per half-hour, so you should easily be able to see this change. If it hasn’t changed much, you might have flipped the right circuit. Monitor it for a few minutes, at least, to see if it speeds up again (the sporadic usage problem again). Maybe read the meter again in another half hour. If you like, you can estimate your new usage: take the difference in readings, divide by the time in hours between readings, and multiply by 24 hours/day to get your kWh/day usage. Compare with the ~40 you’re getting now. Again, you’re not looking for a subtle effect.
If you’ve managed to turn off the huge power drain, then try turning some of the circuits back on and repeat the half-hour monitoring exercise. Remember to listen for noises as you turn circuits on. You might want to turn on a light (on some circuit that’s still on) before doing this; inductive loads, like air-conditioner motors, have a high startup current and will sometimes cause lights to flicker momentarily. If that happens that’s another Clue about the offending circuit.
If there are circuits you can’t turn off, and the power drain doesn’t go away, you’ve at least ruled out some circuits. Maybe you can, for example, ask your roommate to shut down the computer or use an extension cord to plug it in to a different circuit outlet so you can rule out those circuits tomorrow.
*Don’t quickly and repeatedly flip them; computers and some other electronics should be shut down first, more for data loss than hardware problems; motors don’t like to be turned on and off repeatedly. These should not be issues for you.
Here is my apartment complex, my apartment is E. The ones in light blue all share the same power thingee. The ones in red are in a different closet. The dark blue (I) is the garage. Our power thingee is to the left of garage. Here is a picture of the power thingee taken at 3:30 pm today. I have labeled the units with their respective apartments, so we are E and so on. Here is a pic of the thing at the bottom. These are the switches that I am not supposed to touch.
I went in and completely flipped all of the circuit breakers in my apartment. I went down to check and the wheel had stopped moving. I let it sit for about a half an hour without noticing any movement. I must confess that I was very disappointed that it wasn’t moving just because I wanted this whole ordeal to be over. I flipped on everything but the AC/Fan circuit breakers. I took that pic at 3:30, and then this pic at 4:00, a half hour later. My wheel was moving slowly, at about the same rate that the other other apartments were moving except for apartment B which was rotating very fast. It was rotating at about 7 seconds, while mine rotates at an average of 1 minute 46 seconds. This is with all the circuit breakers flipped into the on position except for the Fan/AC. I am using everything that we used before except for my roomie’s computer which is currently off.
My neighbor in apartment B came back and I asked him if he noticed anything unusual in his bills. He said that normally the bills run about $34 but this past month they were very high because they started using the air conditioning. How high? $120, he just attributed it all to the air conditioning. I saw a girl I didn’t recognize going into apartment F and she said that she and her friends are subletting the place for the summer. They haven’t looked at the bill and don’t plan to because they aren’t going to pay it as part of the agreement. A looks vacant and D and C have stuff in them, but no one answers the door when I go by. Normally apartment D leaves their door wide open. We often get their mail and many times I have walked inside and placed the mail on their kitchen table. The doors have been closed and the lights off for the past few days, so they may be on vacation or something.
Anyway, if you click on “original pic” you can zoom in and see the numbers clearly. Our meter has barely moved in that half hour. I just went down now at 4:40 and it moved a tiny tick, the same amount as between 3:30-4:00. Compare our usage with apartment B, which is running the air conditioning and who knows what else. As you can see, in that half hour, almost one full 1 kwh was used. At 4:40, the dial was half way between 6 and 7 so between 3:30 and 4:40, 1.5 kwh were used (I can upload a pic if anyone requests it). They are running the air conditioning constantly and this is the hottest time of the day. I do not know what other appliances they are running, but I know the guy is going in and out regularly.
This is good advice, but before you start with breaker flipping, I’d start by turning off/unplugging everything. Don’t worry about the room-mates computer- it won’t be damaged if he uses the shut down.
If everything is turned off & unplugged (many devices drain small amounts of pwoer even when shut-off- a VCR is an example), then the little dial should stop moving. If it doesn’t then you either have a power thief or you didn’t unplug everything.
Once you do that, and the little dial stops spinning, then turn some stuff back on (lights, refrig- NOT computers), and try the breakers as above.
In my old apt I did the “turn everything off” trick and found out that the outlet plug outside my door was running off my meter, and that my manager had been cleaning out a couple apt without power with that plug!
So those two pictures were taken with all the breakers on except for your AC/fan breaker, right? It looks like maybe 0.2kWh between the two pictures, for about 10kWh/day, right? That seems reasonable and is in line with your earlier usage. So now try turning that one remaining breaker on and see if your wheel starts spinning again. (Listen for a motor as you turn the switch; do the half-hour measurements again.) If so you’ve (probably) isolated the problem to the AC. Since you don’t want the AC on, you could just turn that breaker back off; but since you tried to turn the AC off at the thermostat, either there’s something set wrong there (wait, this is in Fahrenheit?! I thought it was Celsius! :)) or either the AC or thermostat is broken.
If that circuit seems to be the problem, I’d suggest turning that circuit off and checking the meter periodically tomorrow to make sure that seems to solve the problem (i.e., make sure your 1kWh dial never moves anywhere close to 1 per hour). If so, check your thermostat (maybe post a picture with its current settings).
This might point to some kind of theft, though??
From what you’ve said, I doubt your AC is operating. However, if it were this is what it would draw:
The nameplate you pictured appears to be from the air-handling unit. It has a 1/3 hp fan. That will have a power draw of about 0.25 kW. For every hour it operates, it will consume 0.25 kWh.
The nameplate said that your unit is 40AQ030. The “030” means that you probably have a 2.5 ton condensing unit. Assuming an EER of 12, this unit would draw 1 kW/ton, so your condensing unit would draw 2.5 kW. Again, for every hour your condensing unit operates, it would consume 2.5 kWh. Your actual efficiency might be a bit lower than 12, though.
I recently did a study on acceptable energy usages for residents in a 3 bedroom apartment. The unit had gas heat and domestic hot water, but electric cooking. Excluding air conditioning, the electricity allowance we came up with was around 500 kWh per month. This allowance included cooking, refrigeration, lights, appliances, and laundry. That’s not to say that anyone in a 3 bedroom apartment SHOULD use 500 kWh per month; our goal was to set an acceptable allowance level for reasonable energy use, and to surcharge tenants who exceeded that level. Incandescent lights made up a good portion of that total allowance, so if you do keep your lighting levels down and turn off lights when they’re not in use, or use compact fluorescents instead, your usage would be much lower.
I know YWalker, and let me tell anyone here, she knows energy consumption. If she suspects 2.5kW, then by all means ignore my guess that the AC would not get above 1kW. I wasn’t thinking that a unit as large as 2.5 ton would be used for an apartment, as my house unit is 3 ton, so I messed up.
:: blushes ::
Thank you, Una. (And, the unit could be smaller than 2.5 ton. The size of the condensing unit typically matches the air handling unit; however, it wouldn’t surprise me to see a 2 ton unit instead.) Still, as you noted, there’s no way it could be drawing 18 kW.
Agreed. The peak draw from a microwave probably is around 1 kW, although this will vary a bit my size and model. However, microwaves don’t operate at peak load like a light bulb would. They cycle up and down, and spend most of their time at only a fraction of peak.
If you microwaved on highl for 10 minutes, I would (as a WAG) guess the energy usage would be something like 0.4 * 1 kW 10 min (1 hour / 60 min) = 0.067 kWh.
If I understand the OP’s numbers correctly, the actual (long-term-average) power consumption at issue is something like 1.5kW (or, really, the difference between that and the prior normal usage of ~400W), not 18kW. This is, as you say, well within the range of an AC unit (and probably a good estimate of hot-weather daily-average power usage for a 2.5kW unit), so it wouldn’t be too surprising except that kimera doesn’t think the AC has been on at all (and in general seems not to use much electricity).
Results of the breaker test, though, suggest to me that the AC (or at least something on that circuit) might have actually been on. The drop in usage over the half-hour with that circuit off could be coincidental, but it’s the strongest hint I’ve seen so far.
Okay, I am stumped. I turned the AC/Fan circuits back on at 4:30 pm. At 5:00 pm, the rotation had slowed down to 2 minutes, 18 seconds. At 5:22 it was back at 1 minute, 7 seconds.
I went to work and did a meter read upon returning. I took this pic at 11:15 pm. The dial is turning at 1 minute, 14 seconds. The new number (which you can see in the pic) is 96276. This means that between 2 pm and 11 pm, 3kwh were used. That leads to an average of .33kwh/hour or 8kwh/day. I have on the fridge, microwave, lights and my computer. The AC/Fan circuit breakers are on. I am waiting to turn on my roommate’s computer last. If it isn’t the computer, then I don’t know what the hell it is because everything else is working fine. I am going to try and wait another day to get a full 24 hour reading before turning on my roomie’s computer. Hopefully she’ll spend the night with her boyfriend.
When you’re not actually cooking anything, your microwave is a negligible load.
Most large TV’s have a phantom load that exists even when the TV is turned off as long as the set is plugged in. This is what allows the TV to have the instant on feature, and be able to recognize your remote.
Your refrigerator usage will vary over the course of the day. The compressor (which is the major portion of the load) runs for a while to achieve the desired temperature, and then shuts back down when it is achieved. There is still usage from the refrigerator when the compressor is not running, but it is at a much lower baseline level. As you’d expect, the usage is generally higher during the day, when the apartment is typically warmer and there are people opening and closing the door.
The lights are the simplest load to understand of all. Just add up the total wattage of the lamps you have operating, and your usage is (total wattage divided by 1000) * hours of operation.
If you’re in the apartment, I’d feel sure you know if the AC is operating. Surely you can hear the air handler when it turns on and off. Ditto for the condensing unit — as long as you know which one serves your apartment, you can definitely tell whether or not it is operating. You might have to step outside to tell, however.