I was wondering why the Kill-A-Watt wattmeter that I normally leave things in the room plugged into was beeping. Turned out that having an electric kettle and a space heater both on on a circuit were enough to drive the power usage over the 1800W that a normal US household circuit can provide, and that apparently the thing beeps in that case. It let me flip off the kettle before the circuit breaker flipped, which was nice.
I think I might look into a low-wattage, vacuum-insulated (to help compensate for the fact that the heat will have to be put into the water over a longer period of time) kettle.
I’ve tripped my breaker doing stuff like that.
A space heater will bring a standard US residential home circuit to max capacity.
If a circuit is currently being used to run a space heater, youd be very wise to unplug everything else from that circuit.
Thank you for reminding me that I need to get heavier breakers on every circuit in my house.
that’s a bad idea if you don’t upgrade wiring too.
But I want to start a fire inside of my walls :(
Oh, I’ll probably have to upgrade wiring too. Unfortunately what’s in my budget is probably single-strand 22-gauge aluminum core, if I’m lucky.
I have an Emporia Vue CT monitor that watches all my lines right at the box. IDK about newer versions, but the old version could be hacked so you don’t have to use their shitty app.
I’m pretty sure both of those devices are intended to be the sole device on a circuit. It’s the only way you can get enough power for them.
The instructions should note this, but who reads those? Haha
I run into this in my kitchen (which was built before code required microwave on its own circuit).
I can run either the espresso machine (1100w) or the toaster oven (300w) and microwave (1000w) simultaneously. If I forget and run all 3 it will blow the breaker.
Fortunately my morning routine is coffee first, then use the toaster oven, then microwave. I only found out they were all on the same circuit by changing my routine.
Neat the kill-a-watt caught this for you.
If it was a kitchen outlet, it may have been a 20A (2400 watt) circuit. Still, a kettle and space heater at the same time would still have been stressing that.
Did it show you the combined wattage or max out at 1800?
If it was a kitchen outlet, it may have been a 20A (2400 watt) circui
Nah, this was a 15 amp circuit, though that’s a fair point.
Did it show you the combined wattage
It showed something like 2400W, IIRC, but the meter itself is only rated to something like 1900 W (well, VA), so it may not have been a perfectly-accurate reading.
goes back to try each independently, and both together
With both on, and the other load, it shows about 2300W in total load for the circuit.
There’s about 200W of other load on the circuit.
The heater alone — listed as being 800W, if I remember aright – bumps it up by 700W alone.
The kettle bumps it up by 1300W alone. So it might have been ~100W off at that point, but it was correct that it was over what the circuit could do.
