In my house I have bathroom one, bathroom two, fan, kitchen, outlets, living room, L outlets, stove, kitchen outlets two, hall, upstairs, bedroom 1, bedroom two 2, bedroom one outlets, bedroom 2 outlets, outside.
I only have one bathroom, and I don’t have a fan in any room so God knows what that controls.
I also have some wiring in the attic space with a big sign on the power box that says “WARNING wiring uses incorrect colours” and they’re all brown.
I’m betting your house used to have a 2nd bath or was going to get one but was abandoned. The fan was likely the bathroom 2 or possibly a range hood.
All brown wires is definitely what’s incorrect. Hot, neutral and ground should be easily identified at a glance (black or red for hot, white for neutral, green or bare copper for ground where I am). I’ve only ever seen brown sheathing on older fabric or paper insulated wiring.
Where I am brown is live. So they’re all live wires apparently.
The house was built in the early 1920s so I’m not surprised that it’s weird. It was built before homes really had electricity or indoor plumbing so the wiring and bathroom were added after the fact. Combined with the fact that the previous owner did a lot of DIY and weren’t very good at it.
Bold of them to assume there are that many circuits in any house built in my area. Most of the breakers will apparently control nothing, and then there’s exactly one circuit that controls half the house, including the kitchen, so if you run the microwave and a blender at the same time, it’ll trip.
I just got a giant, house-encompassing circuit like that broken up in my house. It ran the entire length of the front of the house, one wall each from two bedrooms, the entire living room, and one wall of the garage. Like who on earth ever thought someone would want all of these things controlled with the same circuit breaker? Getting it split up was the best money spent.
I have two outlets in my apartment that do not power down with any breakers.
I have to pull my main breaker for those two outlets to be without power.
And I have the full schematics for the wiring in my place.
And it's not that they show these outlets should be wired to a specific plug either.
The schematics don't show those two outlets at all :|
Even weirder, I have a digital power meter that autoreports my usage to the power company and has a reporting port that I feed into my Grafana installation that reports down to the milisecond.
When I power things through one of these outlets, it shows fuck all increase in power consumption on the meter.
So, one of the two outlets seems to be drawing power from either another apartment OR the buildings main grid that runs the utilities and halway lighting etc.
Ah, sounds like it was added by an amateur. I had an electrician come round to move a socket once, he removed it but then promptly ran away because there was so much amateur garbage in our walls.
If you pull your main breakers and they shut off then they are running through your meter no? Also, your main breakers are probably like 100-200 amps instead of the 15-20 amps that should be on an outlet and it’s wiring. Those outlets are essentially unprotected. Anything goes wrong and it’s death or fire, or both. Are you in north America?
I'm glad you noticed, as that was the lil fun bit I was hoping someone would catch on to.
The outlet that doesn't seem to consume from my mains, does get shut down when I pull my main breaker.
And as a response to what TheRealLinga said, oh hell no. If I don't know what breaker is behind that socket, I'm not going to power anything from it. I like living here, I'm not going to risk burning down the building XD
Only way I see the ghost power socket can work is if its on a relay that gets switched from my power while switching an outside source.
There however is no relay to be found in the panel or anywhere else accessible.
My apartment takes up the entire floor, but other floors have 2-6 units. When I go by the layout of the 4 unit floors, the location of this outlet is about where those floors maintenance room is.
So what I'm suspecting is that at one point, my floor also had 4 units, then got gutted completely and my apartment was built in it and then for some reason they wired that outlet rather than just cut and terminate the wires.
Still leaves the mystery why the other outlet, that does clearly draw power from my mains, also seems to be wired without a breaker.
I'm not in the US.
But from my experimentation with the breakers and power draw and graphing my power consumption and a load of other stuff on Grafana, should be clear I'm informed and smart enough to not use sockets that I don't know the limits for. So don't worry, I'm not using them at all.
But it's still an interesting mystery I enjoy trying to get to the bottom of.
The buildings megastructure is quite old, it was one of the few buildings that survived WW2 without much damage in this area.
It was originally a brewery, then a garment factory, then a nunnery and in the late 80's was gutted and converted to an apartment building.
The wiring plan I have for my apartment is from 2008, which I suspect is when the previous owner gutted the entire floor and installed the single apartment where there used to be 4.
While not foolproof, many power strips will have an integral breaker to trip if you exceed the power strip capacity. You could plug one of those into the outlet and the power strip would be a way to prevent an over-current condition. Of course, if you don’t need to use it, there’s no sense in rolling the dice on how reliable a power strip breaker is.
Yeah, except for one of them, it literally isn't drawing power from my panel.
I put a 1000W test load on it and my meter showed no deviation of the load what so ever.
On the other outlet and every other outlet in the apartment, it does.
And as I already said/acknowledged, the only way that can happen is if there's a relay or similar switching method being driven by my power that switches power coming from somewhere else.
It just occurred to me that I actually do have a hot water heater. Two actually. I put them in under my kitchen sink - one raises the 125F domestic water to 140F (and provides near-instant hot water), and the second takes that 140F water and heats it to 185-190F at a dedicated faucet (for filling stock pots, making large quantities of tea, etc). I think I have as much copper run to push electrons as I have to deliver the water in my kitchen sink.
Lol I live in an old house where the electrics are messed up like that. We got a new water heater last year that uses significantly more power than our old one. So if we used the coffee machine (on the opposite side of that floor of the house), we had to unplug the panel heater in the hallway!
We had an electrician install a new breaker for the water heater and that fixed the problem lol
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