Our electric bill has been running pretty high even though it hasn’t been that cold and we’ve been supplementing with wood heat. Decided to track down the culprit and hooked up an energy usage monitor to one of our 5 sub panels. Gonna check the other 4 over the course of the next few days.
A bit curious about the 5 sub panels. Did you just need a lot of separate circuits? Is the main 200A? Good luck getting to the bottom of it.
It has 200 amp service. It’s a pretty unusual setup, all original to the house which was built in the early 70’s. It would probably be prohibitively expensive if you did it the same way now. It was just way overkill to begin with.
That’s what I was thinking, too. 5 subpanels for an average residential home is pretty huge. 2-3 is still okay for a 150-200a service, but 5…that’s a lot of circuits….
One in the carport, one in the workshop, one on each floor of the house - that’s five plus the new panel I’m putting up for the greenhouse, not that many, imho. I just like clean infrastructure and hate core drilling concrete more than necessary.
One on each floor of the house is insane, why do you need breakers everywhere?
Every room has two circuits for the outlets and one for the lights so a fault can be fixed with some light and powertools available and so that every room still has power when a single phase goes out. The kitchen alone has about ten circuits, freezer, dish washer, oven, microwave, kettle each one of their own, induction stove three because 3 phase power and a few for the normal outlets. I just want to be able to run everything at the same time e.g. when making breakfast. It adds up that way.