When am I using too many watts?

[greentard]

Using too many watts for a grow is one of the indicators that can get the police on your case. I was just wondering how many Watts a typical household uses in an hour/day. How many Watts of power before you are obviously doing something out of the norm.

If anyone knows of an ways to produce Electricity without leaving a sign, post some Ideas. I thought about a Hydrogen Generator, they exist, and can be converted from existing Internal Combustion Engine, but Hydrogen Supply is not readily Available. There is ofcourse Solar (which is a waste when using Photovoltic panels as they do not produce as much Energy in their short lifetime to make up the amount of energy needed to create them) and also Wind (not very reliable).

greentard Reviewed by greentard on 05-30-2007. When am I using too many watts? Using too many watts for a grow is one of the indicators that can get the police on your case. I was just wondering how many Watts a typical household uses in an hour/day. How many Watts of power before you are obviously doing something out of the norm. If anyone knows of an ways to produce Electricity without leaving a sign, post some Ideas. I thought about a Hydrogen Generator, they exist, and can be converted from existing Internal Combustion Engine, but Hydrogen Rating: 5

[...gas...]

i know people who use big arse generator s , bit noisey , many thanx

[...gas...]

petrol 1 that is

[PharmaCan]

During the summer I run my air conditioner about 6 - 8 hours per day. My neighbor runs his a/c 24 hours per day in the summer. My summer bill goes up about $100/month with the a/c use. So my neighbor's bill probably goes up $400 - $500. The point is, there are many different levels of power consumption throughout identical homes in any neighborhood. You'd have to be using a whole lot of electricity to catch anyone's attention.

[stinkyattic]

1k per bedroom, plus one for the house. If you have a 3 br home, keep your grow below 3k total (lights & climate control) and limit consumption in the rest of the house.

I actually want to install a couple wind generators at my place lol... just feed back into the grid and run the meter backwards in times of low power use.

[stickyinsalem]

OR...just buy little cheap ass cfl's for your entire house....a 24 pack of 13 watts is like 20$ at lowes....then buy cfls for your grow...they work great and use little wattage.....easiest thing to do....i did it....my electric bill actually went down....

[onequickmove]

cfls are much less efficient than hps for growing

cfl's tend to get 65 lumen/watt; a 600w hps can get 150 lumen/watt; that's a massive difference

agreed with replacing the lights with cfls, but i wish folks would stop passing false info about how "efficient" cfl's are for growing. they're not very efficient, they're just cool

[stinkyattic]

And if we are talking HEAT, tube flouros are REALLY cool. Personally, I prefer them. A T5 fixture is KILLA.

[stickyinsalem]

how did i pass false info?
i simply said they WILL do good for a grow....dont kick me in the face and call me a retard when it is proven that cfls do work....not saying one bit that hps lights arent better for the grow....but anyone that is on here will tell you that if your itchy about your electric bill...use cfls....next time read what i said.....and if they arent very efficient for a grow....why did my grow produce 3 oz's for 2 plants....not great....but still worked good enough for me....

hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm

[Al B. Fuct]

how did i pass false info?
i simply said they WILL do good for a grow....dont kick me in the face and call me a retard when it is proven that cfls do work....

Nobody 'kicked you in the face and called you a retard.' It was the CFLs critiqued, not the messenger. BTW, you're quite right that putting CFLs in the rest of the house will drop the household consumption and mask the grow usage. Good idea. We did the CFLs and solar water heat. The solar water heat reduced our bill by the same amount that my 2.5kW SoG op raises it.

onequickmove's comment that there's a particular romance on in the cannabis growing community in general with CFLs at the moment is true. They're cheap and available, leading them to be used in a lot of 1st time grow situations. Some new growers think more of CFLs than they really should. They're not 'the future' or even 'the next big thing' as some think. CFLs produce low-intensity light, just like tubular fluoros; if you need foliar penetration and high bud density, you need the high-intensity discharge of HPS lighting for flowering.

CFLs are great for lots of purposes in every grow, particularly for seedlings, clones and slow vegging mums. In a grow space that can't be ventilated well enough to keep temps down with an HPS, CFLs might be used to flower at the expense of yield and densty. However, there's small HPS lights out there these days (60, 75, 150, 250W etc) which are well suited to micro grows and will produce the density of the big mothers, but won't support many plants owing to their low output.

In terms of attracting attention to your op, the 1kW/bedroom + 1kw/house rough guide sounds pretty reasonable. I've been running a pair of 1000 HPS and a 400 as well as a few fluoros for 7-8 years now with no quibble or query. I DO pay the elec bill on time, every time, though. I reckon the power co just thinks I'm a good customer.