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I have 5 computers in my house, 3 of them run 16 - 24 hours a day either as my house server or hosting music or videos to the rest the house. Each of them has an 800 watt power supply. The other two come on in the morning and turn off as my wife and I go to bed. I also have 2 X-boxes at 150 watts a piece, one of which is on upwards of 18 hours a day streaming music. Their combined pull is about 4100watts, couple that with an AC that runs upwards of 19 hours a day, fridge, deep freeze, dishwasher, etc and even a 600w light wouldn't make a noticeable change. The digital meters are read by wi-fi by a guy driving around, he tags it and moves on. They don't hook them into com lines that perpetually monitor your power. They just send a wifi signal with the current read. They've been able to perpetually monitor your draw from the power facility since the 80's. I have a buddy who meter reads, he misses getting out of his truck. Unless they're sitting out there tagging multiple times while the lights are either going on or off they're not going to see anything, and even then they're only going to see the equivalent of a PC being turned on or off unless you're running 3 1K HPS's in flower + 400 - 600 for a veg room, that's rather obvious.Originally Posted by southern homegrower
Stealing power is what gets people caught. The power company regularly monitor the amount of draw from a grid. When the power draw is higher than what has been paid for they start checking which grid is pulling more power, from there they narrow it down to the house (usually by individually cutting power to each grid briefly until they find the extra pull.) After grid and block are determined they find the idiot who spliced into the power cable from his yard. Pay your bill and they don't know or care if you're running a server farm to host porn sites, running an electric kiln, or growing tomato plants. Don't pay your bill / and or steal from them and they'll find you.
My electric bill went down almost 5% because of the more accurate readings from the digital meters. Only a savings of about $7, but at least they're not sending me corrections because of misrepresnted readings. Before the digital they sent me a bill for almost $300 at the end of the year because the guy misread the meter twice in the year (in my favor) and they caught it.
I have a friend who has the equivalence of a 5000W grow, but the only thing he's farming is data. What he's doing (spam email) while, sketchy IMO, is sorta legal and no one bothers him about his 24hr a day 5kwhr pull in addition to his regular 'living' electrical costs. Unless you have a massive grow pushing 5- 10K the power company doesn't care and won't have anything credible to turn over to cops anyway. Under 1K, don't talk, pay your bills, don't sell and don't steal and you'll be golden.
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