One of the biggest issues with electrical concerns is simply keeping all cords, wires, and cables neat and organized, in dry places where they won’t be exposed to water, severe temperatures, or any crimping or kinking. Check your cables carefully to make sure the insulation is solid and intact, with no bare wiring exposed. Wiring doesn’t have to make contact to short out; electricity can arc over air. Check out this link to see an incredible display of electricity arcing.
500kV Switch Opening - Google Video Scary, isn’t it?
The next thing we need to do is specify which circuit in our house we’ll be using. Now, every house and apartment has a circuit box, or breaker box, whatever you’d like to call it. In apartments, this might be inside, it might be outside. Go find it and let’s take a look. Below is a decent enough picture similar to what you should see.
On the door, hopefully, you’ll have some labeling to let you know what circuit breaker goes to which room. Hopefully it will labeled nicely. If not, switch one off, see what room it went to, and keep proceeding until you find the right one. This is a bit easier with two people, one to tell you what went out, and you can just stand there and flip switches. Either way, locate the right one, and turn it off.
Now, let’s go to that room, our snake room, and find out what has been affected. You want to check all light switches and all outlets. It’s important to know exactly what is controlled by that breaker. We also want to check neighboring rooms, bathrooms, hallways, etc, to find out if anything else was affected at all. Now, hopefully you’ve written down which outlets, switches, lights, fans, etc, are controlled by that circuit. You can flip the circuit back on now. We just needed to know what’s controlled by that breaker.
Now we get to have a bit of fun. We need to find out how much power is on this circuit. We’re going to do this by adding up all of our amps. Everything you plug in should be labeled with either watts or amps. Ceiling lights, like any light bulb, will be labeled in watts. Appliances, heaters, etc, may either be watts or amps. Right down everything that’s affected by that circuit, and exactly how much of what it’s using. Be sure to notate if it’s watts or amps, as these two are completely different.
Now that we’ve got our list, let’s separate the watts and the amps. Add up all of your watts, and only the watts. To convert watts to amps, we need to divide our total watts by our voltage, which is typically 120. So, for example, let’s say that we have a lighting bar in our bathroom, complete with 4 bulbs that are each 60 watts. Our total watts is 240, which is simply 4 times 60. Our total amps is 240 divided by 120, or 2. So our 4 bulbs that are 60 watts each use a total of 2 amps. Now, convert all your watts to amps. Once you have that done, add up your amps, and find let’s find out what our total is.
Hopefully, you’re total number of amps on this circuit are going to be anywhere from 12 to 15, maybe a bit more, maybe a bit less. Now, let’s go back to our circuit breaker box. Remember which specific breaker is controlling our herp room? What do the numbers on it say? 15? 20? That’s the maximum amount of amps you can pull before that breaker should trip. If you’re over that number, well, we have a bit of problem. If you’re very, very close to that number, we need to do some trimming.
Obviously there’s a lot more to this. I’m actively working on more, and hope to have it closer to complete by the end of the day.
