Where can I find info on electrical?

I'm planning a cabinet grow and don't want to burn my house down. Where can I find information on how much I can run off one electrical outlet,etc?

Well for starters check this out....

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You won;t burn down the house by plugging too much into a socket... unless you live in a very very old house with very outdated wiring.

Any wiring done in the last few decades won;'t have this problem unless the electrician didn;t do his job correctly :) You'll blow the fuse/breaker before anything bad like that happens.

that being said... any wiring you do yourself that you plug into the socket could cause problems if not done properly or with improper wiring.


as for how much you can plug in... well, heres a quick version.

A couple things you should know (ignore this if you know this already, but given your question i;'m thinking probably not).

Wattage (W) is a measurement of an amount of energy
Amperage (A) is a measurement of the flow of current
Voltage (V) is the potential of the energy (but for this you don't really need to know anything about voltage)

Using the garden hose analogy... think of voltage as the water pressure (you would measure this as a force), amperage as the diameter of the garden hose (you'd measure this as litres per second/minute), and wattage as the amount of water that actually came out (you'd measure this as litres).

A modern standard household circuit (could have multiple outlets just FYI) is rated for 15A @110-120V of current in most cases. This does not mean each house outlet has 15A, it means all the outlets attached to that circuit share a max of 15A.

Next, you'll find all bulbs come with a Wattage rating - this rating tells you how much energy that bulb is going to consume when its on... we can use these ratings to figure out what you want to know.

all you need to do, take all of the bulbs you want to use, total up their watts (so if you have 4 x 23W CFLs, your total is going to be 92W)

now to figure out how much current (A) that will require its a simple calculation

A = W / V

so in our case, A = 92W / 120V = 0.76A, well under the max of 15A.

You will of course need to add a little bit of overhead room, meaning you don;t want to max dead on at 15A, as there is very small amounts of "lost" power due to things like line resistence.