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.
why do they even care? they get to sell more power
When I worked for a power utility, I got called out to inspect a boiling (yes, boiling) power transformer. A weed operation in a house served by the transformer was using so much power for such a long time in the heat of summer that the transformer was about to explode if we didn’t disconnect their power.
It turns out the grow op had illegally bypassed the meter too, so they weren’t paying for the power. Just goes to show there are valid reasons for doing this, even if it’s a bit excessive to report them to law enforcement directly.
Read a horrific story once about one of those falling on a lineman. Like a modern-day version of boiling oil during a medieval siege. It’s pretty fucking crazy we just suspend them overhead all over the place in the right-of-way where trucks and shit can hit them.
You’d think with modern LED setups this would be null and void. It’s quite wild to see a lot of older schooled growers still using sodium lamps and other high heat, high energy lighting fixtures and getting caught, wasting energy, etc.
Now days modern LEDs are multi fold more efficient. You’d also think that if someone was doing bad deeds illegally they’d be more inclined to stick to a more strict standard.
I guess criminals never did have much standards… Organized crime excluded and even then some organized crime syndicates aren’t fully organized in a manner that detection is impossible. They just aren’t a nuisance enough to warrant the big league agencies. Local LEOs are definitely picking up new tech and evolving faster as the money rolls in these last 10 years.
Lighting is only part of the issue. In order to get a consistently reproducible product, growers also try to maintain a consistent temperature, humidity, and airflow. All of which quickly adds up to massive energy consumption. Weed grows best in mild humidity and pretty high temperatures. Which means that in the winter, they end up heating and humidifying the entire house to what would essentially be tropical levels. And in the summer, they’re worried about consistent airflow and dehumidifying. And dehumidifiers eat a lot of energy.
There’s a reason cops use thermal imaging to find grow houses. Under infrared, they light up like a beacon. Cops can just fly a helicopter around town, and flag any houses that look abnormal:
I know. And they do it now days with no warrants in the US which is supposed to be illegal. All other points are very valid.
But generally lights don’t equate heat with modern LEDs is all I was saying unlike old halogen or sodium bulbs.
A lot of growers use basements which obscures a lot of thermal imaging. Including under ground shipping containers, cellars, and more. But your example images are spot on from real people that got caught. I still think profiling should be illegal and there should be some strict laws in place to catch criminals the right ways but rant for another time.
Most modern people don’t have access to all that advanced tech, don’t care, feel it should be legal, poor, average. Not some criminal enterprise. Thanks for uploading the photos though for others to see.
Who the hell grows indoors in California? It has the best climate for outdoor cannabis
Sounds like time to run either a food grow op or Folding@Home on a schedule to create false alarms
Ideally, set up a battery and inverter system in your house, and turn the charging rate up or down depending on what other electric devices you are using at any given moment. Idea is to keep your power consumption exactly the same regardless of what you are doing at home. That way you give no information to the power company.
“this one house has perfectly consistent power usage. That’s suspicious”
Does California not have a legal personal growing law?
The average usage in California is 756 kWh per month* and police are called at 2700 kWh per month. I’m sure the energy company are wondering why the house is using 3 months energy in one month. It used to be 7000 kWh per month so it was probibly garinteed that rather they where in the wrong service (bussness and commercial rate) or its a grow house.
As mentioned elsewhere your house and the grid is not rated for this level of energy for long periods of time and ether the company cuts you off or your house burns down.
*https://www.solarinsure.com/average-cost-of-electricity-per-month-in-california
How the hell do people usée over 700kwh per month on average? Do people leave their AC on 24/7 OE something ?
As mentioned elsewhere your house and the grid is not rated for this level of energy for long periods of time and ether the company cuts you off or your house burns down.
A typical main breaker in the US is rated for 150 amps, general rule of thumb is breakers are safe for 80% of their rated load continuously. At 110v, that 150 amp panel is good for 13.2kw. Over a 30 day month that’s 9,500 kwh.
Anyone using 7000kwh a month is likely on a 200 or 300 amp panel. By the same math above that’s 12,700kwh and 19,000kwh.
7,000kwh is well within safe usage of a normal home under a uniform load, definitely so with a 2 or 300amp main breaker.
Ffs an electric car with a home fast charger pulls nearly 12kw on a single outlet. That plus a fridge and AC running in the house would be too much for a standard 150amp service.
This is a drawback to municipal power supply. Not that private companies all over the US haven’t also ratted out growers, but PG&E would fuckin never lol.
