So the fan in my bedroom starts making some horrible racket last night in the middle of the night and wakes us out of a dead sleep. I get out of bed and shut the damn thing off. It’s a tower fan; one of those tall, cylindrical ones that oscillates back and forth. So today I go on a mission to replace it. No one has them. Apparently no one uses or buys fans in September, because it’s already winter.
So I decide it’s about time I finally get the ceiling fan for the bedroom that I’ve wanted to put in there for a long time. I pick one out, and buy the brace that goes above the ceiling. My house is plaster, and the electrical box on the ceiling in my bedroom is basically just laying on the plaster. The brace goes between two studs and holds the fan. Anyway, I get the shit home and start tearing off the light fixture in the bedroom. I shut the switch off, but don’t bother to flip off the breaker because it’s just a simple light… Right? Wrong! When I pull the fixture down, I notice that there’s one black wire, and two white wires twisted together, which feed the fixture. I can’t think of a reason there’d be a shared neutral in the ceiling (rather than at the switch). Shortly thereafter, I realize that the white wires are warm. And the uninsulated portion of them is actually somewhat hot! Now I’m really concerned, so I start doing some investigating. I put a toner on the wire and started checking other outlets in my house. Get this… The following things are all on the same 15A circuit:
Bedroom
-Ceiling light fixture
-TV
-DVR
-Alarm clock, phone charger, etc.
Dining room
-Existing ceiling fan w 4 60W bulbs
Living room
-Recessed lighting (9x 60W floods)
-Sony 52″ LCD TV
-Denon receiver (135W x 9)
-DirecTV DVR
-Subwoofer (in a different outlet, but same circuit)
-PS3 (actually draws quite a bit of current… 2-3A)
-2200VA APC UPS
Basement bedroom (entire rack of network/server gear)
-Cisco 3550-48PWR
-Cisco 871W
-1TB NAS
-P4 2.4 server with 6 HDs
-Slingbox
-Cable modem
-1400VA APC UPS
I did some quick current readings and found the following:
The home theater draws about 5.5A when just TV, Receiver and DVR are on.
The network rack draws about 4A with the monitor turned off.
If you add all of light bulbs on that circuit up, you get 900W, which equates to 7.5A. I didn’t bother to measure the subwoofer, PS3, bedroom TV and DVR, or alarm clock and other BS.
You do the math… How is it that my house has not burned down? Why did the 15A breaker never pop?
I knew quite a bit of my upstairs was on the same circuit, but I didn’t realize how bad it was. I desperately need to run dedicated circuits for my network rack and home theater. For the time being, I’ve routed my network rack power to another outlet that’s on it’s own circuit in the basement.
Needless to say, the ceiling fan is not installed. I can’t wait to see what an adventure that winds up being. I predict an unplanned skylight!