How Do You Avoid Overloading An Electrical Circuit?
• Read the amperage on the breaker that keeps tripping. • Read the circuit legend to find out which room or particular load it feeds. • Turn the breaker off and unplug everything on that circuit, you can use a lamp to test the outlets to see if they are “hot”. • Circuit breakers may only be loaded to 80% of their rating. If the breaker had a rating of 20 amps, 80% of its rating would be a 16 amp load. Likewise, a 15 amp breaker is capable of providing a 12 amp load when applying the 80% rule. • Start plugging things back in one by one and adding the amperage of each device. Appliances all have a sticker on them somewhere with the amperage on them. And for lamps you can use this simple formula to calculate your “lighting load”: WATTS / VOLTS = AMPS A 100 watt bulb on a 120 volt circuit: 100watts /120volts = .833 amps, if on a 240 volt circuit: 100w/240v = .416 amps). If you determine that that you still have devices to plug in and not enough capacity on the breaker, now it is time to ca
