I’m thinking that some other A/C unit in the complex is on the same circuit as yours. This would explain several of the weird things you’ve noticed:
[ul]
[li]Power consumption jumps as summer begins[/li][li]Power consumption zero when breakers are off[/li][li]Renters nearby whose owner is fine with paying their A/C bill, sight unseen[/li][/ul]
I have a “neat” theory and a “sloppy” theory. “Neat” theory is that the owner with renters knows or suspects that someone else is paying for his A/C, and rents his place using that as a perk. The “sloppy” theory is that somebody accidentally slaved a different apartment’s A/C to your line. Since you’ve seen the junction box, I don’t know how likely this is, or if it’s even possible.
Just to punctuate this - as I posted earlier, it personally happened to me…who knows how many hundreds of dollars I never saw back, either.
If you flipped all the breakers and the meter halted it’s likley (assuming current is being stolen) that the tap in is where someone punched through the wall or floor in an adjacent side or upstairs apartment to access your AC line.
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Posted too soon
Have one of your friends listen to the adjacent apartment AC units when you kill your main breaker and see if any AC units in adjacent apartments go off.
It hasn’t happened to me, personally, but I have lived in apartment buildings where such shenanigans were common, including one case where some genius decided to rewire his apartment to connect at least some of his appliances to his neighbors’ meters. The idiot was evicted and IIRC, the complex managers helped the neighbors recover the money they lost paying for Genius’s electricity.
My mother, when she owned multi-unit buildings, had hired an electrician to update some wiring to bring it up to code. This winner miswired some of the higher-load outlets to the wrong meters, which is why I asked about any recent electrical work.
Robin
Le bump…
Was there any resolution to this?
I wish there was, but everything is normal now. After I went around and told everyone in the apartment complex what I was planning on doing, I haven’t noticed any spikes in the meter at all. The random blips of power loss have stopped too, they ended about the same time that the extreme power drainage stopped. I’ve been checking on it every week or so and we are back to our regular usage of 8-10kwh/day.
Now that seems suspicious. It suddenly stops after everyone knows that you’re investigating? Hmm…
That’s too bad. Probably no easy solution other than to keep monitoring usage, then. Watch closely at the next heat wave, I guess.
For more complicated solutions, I know there exist circuit-followers that inject RF into the line so that you can detect the wires and figure out what circuit each outlet is on, but I’ve never used these. You’d probably need access to other apartments or the roof to test some of these, though.
This thread has my ears pricked.
We have a 1415sf condo in SoCal (serviced by Southern California Edison), and last month our usage supposedly doubled…and our bill went from $120 (which is our typical annual high, usually seen in these hot summer months) to over $350. We about had a heart attack.
Since then we’ve scaled back the a/c use considerably, but even so, our bill (just available online today, like yours) is $150. Sheezo. That’s still high.