Defective meter?

If you have killed the main breaker then it should be dead ! I would be looking for a defective meter or some kind of leakage on your side between the meter and breaker. Possibly a defective breaker, though unlikely.

I have seen leakage on long lines, a few feet, due to damp/moisture in the cable.

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Look inside your breaker box for lizards, bugs, surge arrestors, carbonized patches, moisture, etc. on the upstream side of the main breaker. You could also try snapping the main breakers out completely.

Is it an "old-style" meter or a newer electronic one?

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LOL< they put in a shunt at the Box! :)

"

I bought this house 2 years ago which had all new wiring, new panel and everything is shiny new inside the box. It's a 'spinning disk meter'. A digital might not even show this leakage.

Can't help with usage despite main breaker off but with it on you've probably got a doorbell xformer and perhaps a furnace/AC xformer. Any light switches with neon glow in the dark features? electric clocks that don't run on batteries?

If it's that new, it probably has (as another poster noted) remote readout so they don't have to send out a meter reader. That consumes power.

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Which presumably is less than you would have to pay for the guy to get off his fat ass and read the meter. One way or the other, you pay for your meter to be read.

OP: How much money are we talking about, per month, here? Did you figure that out?

Whole house fire detecters?

Depends what you mean by "off".

IMHO, "off" doesn't mean "standby", "sleep","hibernate", or anything else other than "off". And "off" means just that - no power consumption at all. If you can't get "off" with a switch on the PC case, just pull the power plug from the mains supply socket.

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Jeff
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Don't lump hibernate in with the rest. Hibernate is really off but it saves RAM contents to disk first so startup will be faster.

snipped-for-privacy@nospam.xmission.com (GMAN) wrote in news:gdhag8$ia6$ snipped-for-privacy@news.xmission.com:

At least it's doing something. Mine's basically a VCR with a hard disk instead of a tape. There's no reason for the hard disk to be running all the time, if instant record is desired than a sizeable RAM buffer should be used.

Puckdropper

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And it wouldn't take much of a microbrain to figure out that it needed to spin up 30 minutes before the record time.

They may feel that it's more reliable to keep the drive spinning all the time.

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No, the meter guy get out of his truck and comes up to the house every month. It's a spinning disk meter, not a digital.

I have everything on power strips that have OFF switches. That's what I turn off.

Seems like if you don't load up ram it would be faster.

None of that crap is on when the MAIN BREAKER IS OFF, get it?

Hibernate is _not_ "off". See

And neither is "Turn off computer" (in XP Home, at least). If I choose that, all the fans eventually stop, and the screen turns off, and the power indicator led goes out. BUT the optical mouse led stays on. Only by switching off the PC does that led go out.

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Jeff
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Incidentally, the price of retail regular gas has NOT been following the price of crude oil. Try the "custom chart" on the above page and check the "show crude oil" box. Crude oil had had dramatic changes in price, with substantially smaller changes in retail prices.

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OK. Well that kind of goes along with what I suspected, in that there is no 'valid' reason from a lifetime / calibration angle for replacing the meter, and that this is just an 'angle' to get the utility company into your house to fit a remotely readable meter for their convenience.

I expect when they were looking for an angle, some bright spark with a degree in media archeology or some such modern nonsense, discovered the original meter manufacturer's spec sheet filed away somewhere, and it said something like "Calibration Accuracy : 25 years Guaranteed", and that was it, they had their 'in'. When you get the form letter, which they send about every 4 weeks, it is written in terms that are just sufficiently 'official' and alarmist to make it look to the average Joe, who's not reading between the lines, that the company have some kind of (almost) legal requirement to come into your house to do this work, and that you need to let them. I hate the way that we are bombarded all the time now with this pseudo-officialdom.

Thing is, I *like* my analogue meter. It's easy to read, which I do daily to keep my own eye on what's being used. My mother submitted to demands to change her meter, and the electronic thing that she has now, is unreadable. It has a tiny LC screen that has to be looked at squarely to stand a chance, and you have to juggle about with little pushbuttons to access it even. I can't read it without my glasses on, so at 86 y o she stands no chance. I know that in theory, there should not be any need for me or her to read the meter, as there can't be any errors or estimated readings when a computer is doing the remote reading, but I think we've probably all been there, and I would like to just verify what that computer thinks it is charging me ...

Arfa