Alt text:
Any electrician will warn you to first locate and flip the house's CAUSALITY circuit breaker before touching the CIRCUIT BREAKERS one.
this post was submitted on 31 Oct 2023
589 points (98.8% liked)
xkcd
8773 readers
44 users here now
A community for a webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
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.
That's awesome! Just plug everything that uses alot of power into those outlets and free energy!
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.
Bad business man. When you notice it was all made by an amateur is when you make the client sign a waiver and an hourly rate to fix it.
They didn't even invoice me for over 6 months 🤷
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.
If your main breaker disconnects those outlets, they aren't drawing power directly from anything but your panel.
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.
Have you checked to make sure they aren't small mimics?