According to a motion the Electronic Frontier Foundation filed in Sacramento Superior Court last week, Nguyen and Decker are only two of more than 33,000 Sacramento-area people who have been flagged to the sheriff’s department by the Sacramento Municipal Utility District, the electricity provider for the region. SMUD called the customers out for using what it and department investigators said were suspiciously high amounts of electricity indicative of illegal cannabis farming.
I thought the LEDs use way less power than the grow lights of old, I guess not!
Lower power use of LEDs just means you can have a larger operation with the same electrical connection.
Also dehumidifiers/air conditioning makes up a big part of the energy use as well. The plants transpire a ton of humidity into the air, which has to go somewhere, and the lights create a ton of heat (even LEDs), which has to be lowered as well.
During flower your lights will also be turned on for exactly 12 hours, and then turned off for exactly 12 hours. That’s an extremely easy pattern for a modern smart meter to recognize. Although that could be hidden somewhat by having a lot of small tents and staggering the timing of the lights, so they don’t all turn on and off at the exact same time. Makes working on the plants a lot less convenient though, since you must never open the tent while the lights are turned off, as light exposure during the dark period can cause hermies, which will ruin your harvest
It’s still the main power drain in a grow room. I use custom LED strips designed to minimize power waste and for 8 plant pots i have to use at least 250W of power just on the lighting.
FBI OPEN UP!!!
I meant plant pots not pot plants!
Electricity grid is like cloud compute.
Better to self-host and run solar or alternative power.
My guess is that the timing and consumption rates are so regularly frequent that it becomes obvious when comparing historical periods.