Breaker Busters and How to Avoid Them

LESLIE: Marcie in Nebraska, you’ve got The Money Pit. How can we help you today?

MARCIE: We have a 15,000 BTU. It’s a window air conditioner.

TOM: OK.

MARCIE: And it keeps popping our breaker.

TOM: Hmm. Yep.

MARCIE: It does it in the heat of the afternoon. If we have it on the fan, it won’t pop it.

TOM: Yeah, yeah.

MARCIE: Is it the window, the air conditioner or the breaker?

TOM: No, the breaker’s doing its job, because you’re pulling too much power. Is this in a bedroom? Or where is this?

MARCIE: It’s a living room.

TOM: A living room. Yeah. In some houses, especially older houses, you have typically too much on that same circuit. You ought to really identify what else is on that circuit and see what you can reduce.

I have that happen once in a while in my house. We had – we used to have to put a window air conditioner in one room in it, because it was just fully exposed and just needed a little bit of help when central air wasn’t getting there. But I knew that if we vacuumed in that house, I had to plug the vacuum into the next room. Otherwise, I’d trip the breaker. So you need to figure out what else is on that.

MARCIE: Well, that’s the only thing that goes off.

TOM: And the other thing you could do is you could have an electrician figure out why that’s happening. Is it noisy? You can – there’s a way to determine exactly how much power that unit is pulling and perhaps even run an additional circuit, just for that unit, that’s properly sized.

LESLIE: Yeah, dedicated specifically for that.

MARCIE: OK.

TOM: But the reason it happens with air conditioners is because when they first kick on, there is sort of a surge of electricity that it needs to get the compressor going. So that tends to push those breakers a bit. And then they do what they’re supposed to do – is turn off to prevent the wire from heating up. Does that make sense?

MARCIE: OK. Yeah.

TOM: Yep. So that’s why it’s happening.

MARCIE: So would it be benefit to put a higher breaker on it?

TOM: Well, it’s not just the breaker. You have to run the properly-sized wire for it.

MARCIE: OK.

TOM: So you have to run a new circuit, OK?

MARCIE: OK.

TOM: You can’t put two – you can’t put a larger breaker on it because then you’re defeating the purpose of the breaker.

MARCIE: That’s what I needed to know. Thank you.

TOM: Well, you’re welcome. Good luck.

For more information on getting to know your breaker box, look here.