I was wondering why the Kill-A-Watt wattmeter that I normally leave things in the room plugged into was beeping. Turned out that having an electric kettle and a space heater both on on a circuit were enough to drive the power usage over the 1800W that a normal US household circuit can provide, and that apparently the thing beeps in that case. It let me flip off the kettle before the circuit breaker flipped, which was nice.
I think I might look into a low-wattage, vacuum-insulated (to help compensate for the fact that the heat will have to be put into the water over a longer period of time) kettle.
A space heater will bring a standard US residential home circuit to max capacity.
If a circuit is currently being used to run a space heater, youd be very wise to unplug everything else from that circuit.
If it was a kitchen outlet, it may have been a 20A (2400 watt) circuit. Still, a kettle and space heater at the same time would still have been stressing that.
Did it show you the combined wattage or max out at 1800?
If it was a kitchen outlet, it may have been a 20A (2400 watt) circui
Nah, this was a 15 amp circuit, though that’s a fair point.
Did it show you the combined wattage
It showed something like 2400W, IIRC, but the meter itself is only rated to something like 1900 W (well, VA), so it may not have been a perfectly-accurate reading.
goes back to try each independently, and both together
With both on, and the other load, it shows about 2300W in total load for the circuit.
There’s about 200W of other load on the circuit.
The heater alone — listed as being 800W, if I remember aright – bumps it up by 700W alone.
The kettle bumps it up by 1300W alone. So it might have been ~100W off at that point, but it was correct that it was over what the circuit could do.
Just stick a penny in the fuse and you’re golden.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penny_(United_States_coin)
In late 2025, the Mint halted the production of pennies for circulation, largely due to cost.[8][9]
They’re antiques now! Can’t expend them on such mundane uses!
I have an Emporia Vue CT monitor that watches all my lines right at the box. IDK about newer versions, but the old version could be hacked so you don’t have to use their shitty app.
I’ve tripped my breaker doing stuff like that.
