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Amperage of equipment

mediumrare

mediumrare

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So, a bit of a backstory, I am in a rather old house with old school wiring. I have the system running on a 15amp plug-in GFCI to be safe. I know the amperage of most of the equipment (AI, Ecotech, Maxijet) However i can not for the life of me find the amperage of the heater and return pump.

Does anyone know how many amps each of the following draw?
Eheim Jager 150W heater
Eheim 1250 utility pump?
Aqua Gadget Minimax Midsize reactor pump
 
Maximum wattage is typically easy to find for individual devices, and you can divide watts by voltage to obtain a back-of-the-envelope calculation for ampres (Amps = Watts / Volts).

So if an Ebo-Jager heater actually draws 150W, divide by 120 V to get 1.25 A (150W / 120 V = 1.25 A).

If you're feeling very finicky I have a Kill-A-Watt meter you can borrow. Thank goodness for LEDs, back in college I would trip the breaker if I had more than one 400W halide on and decided to nuke something in the microwave. :D
 
10.6A? What the heck you got connected to that?

My 120G, with two 200W heaters running is pulling less than 6A. With lights it's less that 7A. These numbers come from the Apex. I don't know if they are accurate.

At 10+A you are starting to get close to the max for a 15A circuit. IIRC they are supposed to have only 80% the rated load or about 12A.
 
My figure is max amps based on the power supplies and specs of the equipment, not necessarily actual amps that the system is pulling. Although i may be waaaay off. In short here's what i have running:

2AI Vega
1 AI nano
2MP-10
1 150W Eheim Jager
1 Eheim 1250
1 Maxijet 600
1 Maxijet 1200
2 Aquagadget MiniMax reactors
1 Reefoctopus XS-1000sss
 
Well ... it is not that simple.
Another problem is inrush current on power supplies, and start up current on motors.
For example, the inrush on a Meanwell LED supply is 30 Amps. Yes, Thirty!
And start up of a motor is commonly 7X the full load current.
Fortunately, your wiring and the breakers can usually take short term surges like that.

KEY:
When you turn each item on one at a time, it is a non-issue.
But if you have a power outage, and everything comes back on at once, you can easily have a breaker trip.

If you are at 10A, that combined with inrush surge is a real concern.
However, looking at that list, I would be surprised if you are anywhere close to 10A.
Specs printed on the power supplies are pretty useless. You need to measure.
 
rygh said:
Well ... it is not that simple.
Another problem is inrush current on power supplies, and start up current on motors.
For example, the inrush on a Meanwell LED supply is 30 Amps. Yes, Thirty!
And start up of a motor is commonly 7X the full load current.
Fortunately, your wiring and the breakers can usually take short term surges like that.

KEY:
When you turn each item on one at a time, it is a non-issue.
But if you have a power outage, and everything comes back on at once, you can easily have a breaker trip.

If you are at 10A, that combined with inrush surge is a real concern.
However, looking at that list, I would be surprised if you are anywhere close to 10A.
Specs printed on the power supplies are pretty useless. You need to measure.
Click to expand...

I've been doing some digging around online and i read that a lot of power supplies now use in-rush current limiters Hopefully AI gets their transformers from a vendor that uses in-rush current limiters.
 
mediumrare said:
I've been doing some digging around online and i read that a lot of power supplies now use in-rush current limiters Hopefully AI gets their transformers from a vendor that uses in-rush current limiters.
Click to expand...

Hope so, but unlikely.
Very few Meanwell supplies have that. Mostly SDR series or above.
And Meanwell is a pretty high quality supply to begin with.

But again, given that list you sent, I rather doubt you have a problem.
That is really not that much equipment.
 
You're not pulling 10.6 amps from the wall, maybe an 'in rush' current when you first turn them on but you're no where close to that.

The problem is you're using the listed amps, however you're not taking into account the voltage. For instance all those things you have that eventually are DC powered will have higher amps because the voltage drops, the Vortech and LEDs come to mind. Basically the hardware changes voltage to current, so you don't pull the current directly from the wall.

As an example your vortech running at 12 volts? (or is it 24?) probably has 2 amps listed (or 1 if it's 24 volts), it's only using about 24 watts total, 24 watts / 120 volts (from the wall) = 0.2 amps so it's really only drawing 1/10th of what you're calculating.
 
Either you have a miscalculation or my Apex is really off when it reports amps!

I've never exceeded 7 amps and I'm running bigger return pump and 2x200W heaters.

Has anyone ever compared Kill-A-Watt meter to Apex?
 
Note: Once you start measuring, do all the equipment, and make a detailed spreadsheet.
Calculate yearly cost!
It can be rather eye opening. (Or eye-popping) :eek:

But more importantly, it gives you good information on where to upgrade.
 
I also have a Kill-a-watt if you are in the San Mateo area and want to borrow it.

For "Wifebane" I installed a 20Amp dedicated circuit with dual GFCI outlets. Just for kicks. I hope not to approach 10 amps because ... Holy crap that's a lot.
 
Vincerama2 said:
I also have a Kill-a-watt if you are in the San Mateo area and want to borrow it.

For "Wifebane" I installed a 20Amp dedicated circuit with dual GFCI outlets. Just for kicks. I hope not to approach 10 amps because ... Holy crap that's a lot.
Click to expand...
I'm in San Carlos, but hdept has one for 20 bucks i think. It'll be useful to have around. unfortunately I'm renting the house so adding a dedicated circuit isn't an option. I'm having enough of a hard time getting the property manager to send an electrician over to ground the outlets! Pleasures of living in an old ass house! just for kicks how much did it cost to add the circuit?
 
It's definitely handy to have the Kill A Watt meter. You can get pretty accurate results with that. We used it when we were planning out the build up of our new office space in Palo Alto.
 
mediumrare said:
What's the rest of the hardware you're running?
Click to expand...

2 Eheim 200W heaters
2 MP40
1 Cobalt/MaxiJet 1200
1 Eheim 1262
1 SRO 2000
2 AI Sol blue
2 BRS dosing pumps
1 JBJ ATO
1 AquaLifter (ato pump)

Damm, that seems like a LONG list. :)

PG&E bill was $11.11 last month. Yep, we have PV solar!!

I had a 20A circuit installed. IIRC it was less than $150. Huge price fluctuation depending on electrician. Mine actually charged less than his bid because access was easier than he thought!
 
Wow that's something you don't often see "yeah it was an easier job than I thought, so I'll only charge you this much..."

As you can tell I've had bad experience with "professionals"
 
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