Hi,
I have found this site very helpful. Thanks. My question was that someone brought up that I should balance my breaker box to save on the electric bill. I understand the concept of it but was looking for more information about it. The house has 150 amp service just so everyne knows. Thanks again for any info that will help.:)

Nick

Balancing a panelboard does not save on electric bill, a watt is a watt, and does not matter which side the watt goes through the meter, the meter will still register the watt and the time billing you in kilowatt-hours.


Balancing a residential panel is irrelevant, due to the random draw on power. Balancing a commercial or industrial panel, because the panel can be loaded to near 100% for long periods is when balancing is important. Balancing all commercial/industrial panels ultimately affects the main service equipment, and the utility power equipment.

There can be times, purely by coincidence, or if the design was not planned, one leg can have many circuits for outlets with no or low loads, and another leg that has large equipment running for long periods. This can stress main equipment and the utility equipment.

Any 240 volt loads are as balanced as possible, 120 volt loads get balanced as best as possible due to the arrangement of the busbar and breakers in a panel.

Balancing is a good question, but not something you need to worry about in a home system, unless most of the lights, outlets, and appliances are on most of the day, which if you have teenagers probably seems that way, but really nothing to be concerned with.

For those interested in "balancing" a panel, the goal is to have the same or as nearly the same as possible, current draw on each hot leg. Everything in a building needs to be on, and then using an amp meter, each circuit is measured at the panel, and then the high amp circuits are moved from the high amp leg to the other leg until the circuits are arranged that both main incoming hot legs have as equal current draw as possible.

Can your source of information provide some written detail or explanation of their claims?

Thanks for the help. It was a customer of mine that was explaining this to me. If I can, I will try to contact him and let you know what he said.

- Nick

I only assume that each leg carries half of the available amperage. So if you are heavy on one leg and draw more than half of the amperage with your loads on that leg, the appliances drawing off it will experience less amperage flows and as a result can be stressed because they may not be designed to run off less than a certain amount of amperes. So by balancing your box, you permit each side to actually be using half of the available amperage. The old high side, instead of trying to draw more than half of the amps, is now only (hopefully) drawing half or less. The old low side is now more equal because you took some of the circuits from the high side and put them on the low side. All this is based on my assumption that each leg carries only half of the available total amps for the house.
Please correct me if I am wrong.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by rrbman

I only assume that each leg carries half of the available amperage. So if you are heavy on one leg and draw more than half of the amperage with your loads on that leg, the appliances drawing off of it will experience less amperage flows and as a result can be stressed because they may not be designed to run off of less than a certain amount of amperes. So by balancing your box, you permit each side to actually be using half of the available amperage. The old high side, instead of trying to draw more than half of the amps, is now only (hopefully) drawing half or less. The old low side is now more equal because you took some of the circuits from the high side and put them on the low side. All this is based on my assumption that each leg carries only half of the available total amps for the house.
Please correct me if I am wrong.

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Well, two things.

1) NONE of this is accurate. Pretty much all your assumptions are incorrect.
Each side does not provide half the amperage, or current. A 200A service has 200A available on each leg. I say available because you make it seem like there is only so much and as the draw goes up there is some kind of deficiency happening. This is just not so. There is no such thing as running off too few amps. Amperage is a measurement of draw or flow.

You can use up to rate capacity (and more actually) until the main breaker trips. There are other factors but this is basically how it works.
You can have 195 amps on one leg and none on the other and the panel will still not be "out of balance", at least not to a point where it would cause a problem.


B) This thread is from 2007!