Lighting & electric bill/cops

I was wondering how much electricity hps bulbs and flouresents use ill prob wanna grow like a couple of mothers clones and then flower about 6 or 8 plants at a time. i was wondering how much the electricity i am going to use and if the cops/ electric company are going to pick up on it and think im growing bud.

well thats probably the easiest way to answer thank you

I really doubt that your power increase will be noticed by anybody. Your power bill is going to go up, but it's about the same as if you bought a new tv for an extra room and a big freezer for the garage.

always pay the bill on time i run 4 400 watters and 6 flos fans, etc and never been questioned and some on here run double what i do

i run 2 1000 hps/mh lights
and 3 400 w hps this is a lot of juice but during winter its only 225.00 a month. i have a huge home so be smart. no 700 foot house is going to use 2000 KwH a month.

so i shouldnt worry bout the 5.0 cause yeah the house that im in right now is like pretty big so it should be ok

Try to offset by reducing elsewhere. Line dry laundry, wash in cold water, turn off all lights when not in the room, turn off all applicances or unplug better yet (they carry what is called a phamton load - they are on even when turned off), wash only full dishwash loads, lower your thermostat by 2 degrees (that saves big on your bill), install a gray box (timer on the water heater - that saves us about $10 a month).

Even if it's strange to have a small house consuming a ton of energy, I don't think that would cause investigation. Lots of people are energy hogs.

And Mogie is right too. Doesn't hurt to offset your bill by doing a little green work. If you've got any money and you own your house, you could insulate the place better and add newer windows and a programmable thermostat.

420penguin said:

Even if it's strange to have a small house consuming a ton of energy, I don't think that would cause investigation. Lots of people are energy hogs.

And Mogie is right too. Doesn't hurt to offset your bill by doing a little green work. If you've got any money and you own your house, you could insulate the place better and add newer windows and a programmable thermostat.

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you should think about this statement carefully, if you consume a high volume or "Demand" they will foce you here to use a commercial meter, if you consume say 4200 kwh a month summer an winter and you have say 1100 ft house this is a RED flag, they keep old data so they can easily adverage out what was the normal usage.

almost every indoorgarden busted here in texas was from a tip from meter reader or electric company.

here in texas there is afair amount of indoor growing occuring. they have passed rulings preventing law inforcement from using heat sencing devices to
look inside your home business or dwelling. they need probable cause before they can secure a warrant. if the local electric company checked residental demand they could see a spike from your hid lights. they limit this to commercial meters here. so if you started 3 1000w lights on 120 you pulling about 29 amps. big deal, but all at once pulls alot of power from your local grid. but on a demand meter they measure not just how much you use but also your power spikes. so i personally use over 2100 kwh a month for my garden. this is the adverage consumption of a 1900-2500 foot house or family of 5. i cycle my lights to lower demand(allow 15 minutes before powering another ballast) this pulls less power at once making no noticable drop in amps available from the transformer.

this makes it important to seperate my garden from my residence. here in my town 70% of meters are digital and transmit readings directly to our provider so in april of last year when i bought the place the adverage monthly usage for 5 years was 900 kwh per month. so when i puchased the first thing i did was pull a permit to upgrade my 100 amp service to 200 amp and change meter loop wire and all. so after the upgrade and new meter we adveraged 2700 kwh per month. so by limiting my demand cycling the lights, upgrading service and meter i a good to go so to speak. when the summer hits the lights go off because i am tapped out. i dont dare go over 3000 kwh a month.
i have replaced electric dryer and water heater to gas this reduced about 500 kwh a month alone.

understand power consumption on a grow is the most impotant factor. couple of 1k lights no worries, 2000 or more watts a hour gets risky, and the first place they will always look is you bills.....

here is our town you can call the power company give any address and ask what the adverage monthly usage is there, say like i am thinking of buying this house and want to know.

so my street there are 6 houses my size the adverage summer usage in my area for 2600 foot is 1900 kwh .....

places like canada i hear they balance usage on the grid to help lower theft
so your usage is even more scruntized. if you want to garden you need to do some serious thinking and understand what is normal. a few 400 watt lights no big deal. but if you want to get serious then you need to understand what they look for.

Read This:
Supreme Court case, Kyllo v. US, where the court held that the use of infrared sensors to detect heat emissions from a grow lamp was an impermissible violation of the Fourth Amendment.

Ok heres the scoop on getting busted by electric consumption.

If you live in a big city chances are you are on the grid system. They don't send the electric police out to get you, but instead they can and will follow the electricity you are using. They can follow the juice all the way to the source--->Your grow room. The only time they will do this is when you go over their peak consumption.

Example:
A friend of a friend who is in a rock band has all his equipment at his home, amps guitars and so forth. They rock out everyday and they consume huge amounts of electricity.

Ok so heres the deal. They get a knock on the door one day and to his suprise it's the police along with a rep. from the electric company. They ask him why he is using a lot of electricity, so he explains about all the equipment their band uses. Of course you know they didn't believe that story, so they asked to enter the home to take a look around. Of course he had nothing to hide, so he let them enter.

The first thing they do is head right to the room that has been using all the electricity. Unknown to him, they already knew exactly which room it was. After looking in that room they decided to ask if they could look around the rest of the place, which he said ok.

After looking through the whole place and not finding any marijuana plants, the police start to give him probs. saying they know he is growing and to tell them where it's at. Talk about freaking this dude out. He never grew marijuana in his entire life, and he kept telling them that they are out of their minds.

So after giving him probs. they left, but not for long. About two hours later they were back and they brought a technician with them who worked for the electric company. They asked him to power up all his equipment so that they could get a reading from it to see if his equipment really was the source. Turns out it was the source of the electric consumption. After talking with the tech. he discovered he was on a grid system and they knew the whole time which room was using up the electricity.

So beware if your on a grid system. To find out if you are, just call your electric company they will tell you all you need to know, including how much consumption triggers a red flag.

Thank God I use solar & wind power to offset my electric consumtion. But then again I'm not on a grid system so It really doesn't matter.


Hope this made since! Didn't to me, but it's a true story!

Good information although if you are running more than a few 1K W lights and are growing big time you should probably have a location dedicated for that purpose.

MightyBuddha said:

Good information although if you are running more than a few 1K W lights and are growing big time you should probably have a location dedicated for that purpose.

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Excellent point! That's how those three guys in Florida got busted. To huge of a grow going on! I would like to know what was going on inside their heads. What Dummies!

Another thing to keep in mind is that many people are charged also when they use their power. I believe that its called peak metering (please let me know if I'm wrong on that). So if you just run your lights during the off peak hours your are charged a lower rate.

Instead of running 24 hours (like I did) I cut back to 18/6. That saved a few more $$$ off the bill.

You must have an off-peak meter or Time of Use meter to qualify for discount rates. If your meter has a bunch of small dials and no digital read-out you need to call the electric company to get an off-peak meter hooked up. Lots of people do this for electric hot water heaters.

Vote 2 Legalize Marijuana said:

Read This:
Supreme Court case, Kyllo v. US, where the court held that the use of infrared sensors to detect heat emissions from a grow lamp was an impermissible violation of the Fourth Amendment.

Ok heres the scoop on getting busted by electric consumption.

If you live in a big city chances are you are on the grid system. They don't send the electric police out to get you, but instead they can and will follow the electricity you are using. They can follow the juice all the way to the source--->Your grow room. The only time they will do this is when you go over their peak consumption.

Example:
A friend of a friend who is in a rock band has all his equipment at his home, amps guitars and so forth. They rock out everyday and they consume huge amounts of electricity.

Ok so heres the deal. They get a knock on the door one day and to his suprise it's the police along with a rep. from the electric company. They ask him why he is using a lot of electricity, so he explains about all the equipment their band uses. Of course you know they didn't believe that story, so they asked to enter the home to take a look around. Of course he had nothing to hide, so he let them enter.

The first thing they do is head right to the room that has been using all the electricity. Unknown to him, they already knew exactly which room it was. After looking in that room they decided to ask if they could look around the rest of the place, which he said ok.

After looking through the whole place and not finding any marijuana plants, the police start to give him probs. saying they know he is growing and to tell them where it's at. Talk about freaking this dude out. He never grew marijuana in his entire life, and he kept telling them that they are out of their minds.

So after giving him probs. they left, but not for long. About two hours later they were back and they brought a technician with them who worked for the electric company. They asked him to power up all his equipment so that they could get a reading from it to see if his equipment really was the source. Turns out it was the source of the electric consumption. After talking with the tech. he discovered he was on a grid system and they knew the whole time which room was using up the electricity.

So beware if your on a grid system. To find out if you are, just call your electric company they will tell you all you need to know, including how much consumption triggers a red flag.

Thank God I use solar & wind power to offset my electric consumtion. But then again I'm not on a grid system so It really doesn't matter.


Hope this made since! Didn't to me, but it's a true story!

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So many storys Vote. You should write a book or something lol.

Just found this. Pretty easy to use. Super-Grow Electricity Costs Calculator

I'm new to growing. But very old to electronics.

This grid metering you're talking about doesn't make any sense. There is no financial gain for a power company to figure out what rooms you're spending money in. If there's no profit then they don't invest in it or use it.

It's possible that they used a combination of a) neighbor complaining about a nasty smell, b) high power bill, and/or c) a IR sweep of the house to find the bright room where the band was practicing. But there is just no reason for a company to install individual meters to individual rooms.

The could also install individual meters at the breaker box. But that also would be expensive and wouldn't increase profit.

I don't want to piss any one off, especially since I'm new, but I have to tell you that this thread doesn't have a single logical argument for how high power use is leading to busts.

This statement could be true:
almost every indoorgarden busted here in texas was from a tip from meter reader or electric company.

but just because the utility noticed the smell, or some other hint that it was a dope grow doesn't mean that the high consumption was the only thing that lead to a bust.

And having a digital meter that transports directly to the utility is actually better for growers. That means that no one stops by the house physically any more who might get a whiff of what's going on. Our monthly usage was already being monitored. There's no reason to fear it simply being digitized.

I'm not saying to not pay attention to this part of the situation, but you should realize that there were people in Florida who set up HUGE grows in normal homes. And they grew in every single room as hard as they could for more than a year. No busts ever due to power. They were probably consuming 8x a normal household. What got them? They nailed someone for a minor infraction and then made them rat out a friend.

and finally...cops are dumb. really dumb. and when they're not dumb they're lazy and dumb.

We need to be careful, but I don't think that energy consumption is even in the top 3 reasons why people get busted. I'd be REALLY surprised if it's in the top 10.

BaconSquishy said:

So many storys Vote. You should write a book or something lol.

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Well when you get to my age and have been through a lot, stories can be abundant....

Did I ever tell you about the time when I had to walk to school in the snow uphill both ways?

God I hope I don't become one of those old farts with tons of stories to tell that people really could careless about (lol).

420penguin said:

and finally...cops are dumb. really dumb. and when they're not dumb they're lazy and dumb.

We need to be careful, but I don't think that energy consumption is even in the top 3 reasons why people get busted. I'd be REALLY surprised if it's in the top 10.

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Ever live in Arvada Colorado? You'll change your mind after living there! And my friends friend never grew pot! As a matter of fact he can't even smoke it, only one lung!!