The whole line is dangerous. Often from something like a window AC or portable heater added to to same outlet as room lighting and a TV or computer. The AC or heater is already near the maximum current for the line, usually 1400 watts. If you feel the outlets or wire in the walls they will be warm or hot. We have a lot more stuff plugged in than the era when most houses were built. Any connection issues can cause further problems. The wall outlet and circuit breaker are common. If your lights start flickering at all, you need to find the issue quickly. That isn't always going to happen, but in many cases flickering lights are a sign of the problem.
this post was submitted on 02 Mar 2025
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We have a lot more stuff plugged in than the era when most houses were built.
While this is true, most of the devices we use today are DC devices and much lower power. Your standard USB device is maybe 5V and 2A, so only 10W.
In previous “eras” a color TV consumed 500W and the living room had several hundred watts of lamps. Window AC units and electric heaters certainly are not a recent invention.
Maybe there is more stuff plugged in, but it is. ot drawing more than before
My computer was 150 watts back 20 years ago and is 750 now. I am sitting beside a second monitor, window AC, portable heater, DMM, Oscilloscope, soldering iron, hotplate, toaster oven, 2nd soldering iron, laser printer, 3d printer, soldering fume extractor, HEPA air purifier, router, server, three different lamps, two fans, a rack mounted programmable power supply, three other benchtop power supplies, solder pot, laminator, hot air rework station, home theater stereo, and countless chargers for projects and devices. That is all just within my bedroom. Not everyone is a Maker like me, or under life circumstances where they need such things in a compact and accessible space due to physical disability. Perhaps that makes me biased to one extreme. This kind of accessibility for Maker tools is something that did not exist 20 years ago. You might find a few outliers with lots of space, money, skills, and time that did similar things, but these were not some below average middle class fool like me and they were far more rare than they are now. I am very careful about what I have plugged in and powered at the same time even with my room wired for more load than is typical.
Back in the day your monitor(s) would have been drawing a lot more power (I'm talking way back with CRT monitors). Also, your PC doesn't draw 750 watts all the time if at all - 750W is the max rating for the power supply. Even if you did have a very power hungry system (read: GPU) it would only draw that while running full whack, most of the time the PC will idle at lower clock speeds and lower power.
Your soldering irons are probably only 25W, certainly less than 100W (unless you're showing off). The big things are generally anything involving heating, but many of the things at your desk probably don't use that much. After heating it's motors. And, again, these things are generally not all on at the same time.
Suffice it to say, there isn't really any higher risk to the volume and type of load we have today than back when electricity was first installed in houses. It certainly should be said that the installations are much safer now than they used to be, where even a faulty install like this shouldn't lead to a fire - if your cable is installed in ducting or kopex then even if a faulty termination heats the cable up there won't be anything in contact with it to start a fire.
But you should still get check these things checked out. The layers of redundancy by design are great, but you don't want holes in the Swiss cheese to line up - that's when bad things happen.
Meanwhile landlords: two outlets should be enough for a living room right?
This drives me crazy! Every apartment I've lived in has had a shortage of outlets in the main areas. But meanwhile, my mom's apartment has EIGHT sets of outlets in her living/dining area. Sixteen total outlets in that room. 4 pairs in the kitchen. It's amazing, I dunno how she got so lucky.
All those outlets are probably on the same breaker.
Probably per room but most devices aren't going to draw a ton of power. If you have an antique microwave collection, that might be a problem though.
Yes, these days you might have like 20 devices plugged in, but they're all DC and most only draw about 10W each. Also, they're not all drawing power at the same time.
Yep. All the way down to backstabbed outlets (which should be against code but isn’t, at least in the NEC).