One of the not so nice things about older houses is the lack of information left behind about its inner workings…specifically in the electrical department. The house we live in now, actually several of the houses we have lived in lacked a breaker diagram in the breaker box (list of breakers and what they control the electricity to). This is always an irritating problem when you have more than 10 breakers in the box. Usually it goes like this “Was it that one”, “No…that was my alarm clock in the bedroom” , “How about that one”, “nope, that was the refrigerator”. A conversation like this on can go on for 30 minutes depending on the size of your house. If your house is laden with clocks and computers it could take another 30 minutes of running around re-setting clocks, timers, and all the other things that rely on the electricity they are plugged into. We as civilized human beings ought to know better, not really…organization is a learned skill and at times I am hard of learning (wording is intentional…no emails please:). I took the time a few months ago to find what each breaker was powering and I put it together in an excell spreadsheet. Of course in doing this I had to reset every clock in my house and I also had to physically test each outlet and light to find out what area each breaker was powering up (I used a non-contact voltage tester). Making a spreadsheet is fairly strait forward, here is an example of the one I created. **Note – there are many spread sheet programs out there, you can use whatever is on your computer…

– I made the cells larger to correspond to the relative breaker size, it was purely preference on my behalf.

Thank you for reading,
Luke

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Do you have a toaster that trips its breaker every time you use it. Here is some simple math to help you out with this problem.
** Electrical law for finding Amps from Wattage and Voltage is: >>
Watts/Volts = Amps
Household voltage is usually 120V for plugs and lights and 240 for the dryer ,AC/Heat, Oven. The most common breaker is the 20 amp breaker for 120 volts. Here is an example of an overloaded circuit.
– Toaster 1100Watts/120Volts = 9.17Amps
– Microwave 1500Watts/120Volts = 12.5Amps
– Total Amps = 21.67Amps
If you were using a regular 20 amp breaker it would trip every time you used the microwave and toaster at the same time (a 1500 watt microwave is not very common, usually they are 800-1000 watt).

If you are having breaker problems, try to determine how many appliances you have plugged into a single circuit. You may be able to move some appliances to different plugs to alleviate this problem.
Here is a link to determine common appliance watts. Appliance Watts

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