How many appliances on one outlet

Tipmont REMC's mission, adopted in late , is to empower our communities with state-of-the-art essential services. November 03, October 28, Outages News Careers Contact us. Home Safety Safety Blog Don't overload your home's outlets. Don't overload your home's outlets avoid-outlet-overload.

A circuit breaker is one level of protection in a home. These outlets do not have a grounding wire within the electrical system. Because having a grounding wire and grounded three-pronged outlets adds an extra level of safety, newer houses and buildings are required to have three-pronged outlets with grounding wires.

A grounding wire is connected separately to each outlet, and then is connected to the bottom of the breaker box. This grounding wire neutralizes any dangerous electrical current into the ground. A grounding line is used to protect your appliances from surges or overvoltage problems. It also stabilizes voltage and protects people, properties, and equipment from electric shock. For example, say something happened to the hot wire in the plug.

When you plugged something into a two-pronged outlet you would most likely get a shock. The appliance you were trying to plug in could also get a large electric current, potentially ruining it. If the same thing occurred with a three-pronged outlet and you plugged something with three prongs into the outlet, the ground wire would absorb the shock and take the current into the ground where it can be safely neutralized.

If you have a two-pronged outlet and you have three pronged appliances as many people do , what do you do? The plug plugs into your two-pronged outlet, but has three prongs. However, this will not protect your electrical outlet, walls, insulation or your appliances from electrical shocks. Home circuits are either amp or amp circuits that run at volts. The number of amps is printed on each individual circuit breaker switch in your electrical box.

To determine how many watts of power they supply we multiply:. That means:. A amp circuit should be designated for amp load or 1, watts. A amp circuit should be designated for a amp load or 1, watts. Now you know how much power your circuit can provide. The next step is to determine your power needs. Circuit breakers and fuses act as failsafes against electrical overload.

They regulate the amount of current -- the volume of electrons moving through a conductor, such as an electrical cord -- which can be drawn from a circuit. This current is expressed in amperes, or amps.

Most circuit breakers and fuses regulate at either 15 or 20 amps. But circuit breakers and fuses aren't always reliable. This means that you don't necessarily have to overload a single outlet to cause a fire. So how do you find out how much is too much? Actually, it's pretty easy. To determine how much electricity you're using with all of those holiday decorations, you just need to do a little math. The formula looks like this:. You divide that number by the volts in your house usually and you come up with On the next page, you'll find out about some of the other factors that you should take into account when preventing a very toasty holiday.

Special thanks to Prof. In addition to calculating your electricity usage, there are other things you can do to prevent your home from going up in flames this Christmas. Things like faulty wiring, winter weather and bad product choices can all act as contributing factors in a holiday fire. And a lot of these products simply aren't built to withstand the demands of the extra holiday decorations. The CPSC tests products and finds that many counterfeit products can't stand up to even the most basic safety testing.

When they discover a counterfeit or faulty product, the CPSC issues recalls of these products. Even certified products can cause an overload. Electrical devices that are built to put out heat, like space heaters and hair dryers , tend to use more power than other devices. Devices like these may overload a circuit, especially one that's already reaching its maximum amperage allowance. Coupled with a faulty circuit breaker , this overload can cause the products to overheat and possibly catch fire.

But it's even more likely that a fire will occur in a place you can't easily see. Waste heat generated by the electrical current can cause wiring hidden within a home's walls to expand and contract, eventually loosening it. Once that wiring is loose, the electricity can arc, with a heat output reaching 1, to 1, degrees Fahrenheit. That's more than enough to ignite wood or old insulation under normal circumstances, but winter weather is less humid than in the summer.