According to a motion the Electronic Frontier Foundation filed in Sacramento Superior Court last week, Nguyen and Decker are only two of more than 33,000 Sacramento-area people who have been flagged to the sheriff’s department by the Sacramento Municipal Utility District, the electricity provider for the region. SMUD called the customers out for using what it and department investigators said were suspiciously high amounts of electricity indicative of illegal cannabis farming.
- sweats while nervously trying not to look at his home lab server rack in the office closet *
Ha ha I’m in danger!
I have a hydroponics setup that would make pot growers jealous but I grow chili’s and tomatoes in it.
So we get this tip, chief, water and power bills, big trash bags, the usual. We go in hot break the door kill the dog all by the book, and you wont believe what we see:
Santorini, Tiny Tim, Tomaccio, Big Beef, well lit in these pristine pots like its fucking Breaking Bad. All the while the owner’s blabbering how it’s a mistake and this isn’t for sale, we’ve all heard it.
So I put them down and go check the cellar just in case, and this is where the worst of it was. H1776-2023, the pesticide resistant variation, straight from Monsanto labs.
Naturally the sick bastard had an accident on the way, let the coroner do the booking.
why do they even care? they get to sell more power
Depending on the amount of power they are generating, they could be hitting the limit of production at peak times. The grow houses could also be exceeding the rated capacity of residential equipment.
Around here the power companies will tell you to set your thermostat higher to reduce load on the grid during heat waves. (Or just change it themselves if you opted for a reduced rate to allow them to do so)
Or just change it themselves if you opted for a reduced rate to allow them to do so
Reminds me of the snowpocalypse in Texas a few years ago, where the entire power grid failed because billionaires and office buildings refused to turn off the lights. It was like a solid week of hard freeze, and the “rolling” blackouts were pretty consistently only blacked out in poorer areas. People were shitting in grocery bags, because their toilets were frozen solid after what was essentially an entire week of no power in subzero temps. It turned into an even bigger scandal when people’s power finally turned back on for a few minutes, and they realized their thermostats were remotely being set to like 50 degrees. All while office buildings and the rich parts of town were all lit up like Christmas trees.
IIRC that’s also where the Fled Cruz memes came from, because in the middle of the ice storm, Ted Cruz (state senator) tried to flee to Cancun. And all of his constituents immediately started talking about how he was the reason the power grid was unprepared… I think he pushed to cut/deregulate the grid’s winterization? But then they reelected him, because nothing pairs better than “conservatives” and “voting against your own self-interests.”
All while everyone is racing to build new nuclear plants (microsoft fucking bought their own), Trump dumping money into the pockets of his handlers in oil, gas and fucking coal companies. Read the linkedin (gag) article announcing the new “AI EP” from yesterday–its a literal who’s who of shitty companies CEOs cheering the bill they paid for cheering “responsible AI” which references “non-ideological bias”.
All that is to say, the power companies don’t care–they aren’t shutting off businesses. The dystopian future when hospitals are on generators running off (of course) gas because the coal plants can’t generate enough AI deep fake videos of voter fraud in California is upon us. The senior citizen on oxygen’s power is being shut off before Grok’s so they can make sure the accurate information about the 4th Reich is generated.
If you are not keeping the law around drug production and use your not going to keep the electric box up to code.
When I worked for a power utility, I got called out to inspect a boiling (yes, boiling) power transformer. A weed operation in a house served by the transformer was using so much power for such a long time in the heat of summer that the transformer was about to explode if we didn’t disconnect their power.
It turns out the grow op had illegally bypassed the meter too, so they weren’t paying for the power. Just goes to show there are valid reasons for doing this, even if it’s a bit excessive to report them to law enforcement directly.
Read a horrific story once about one of those falling on a lineman. Like a modern-day version of boiling oil during a medieval siege. It’s pretty fucking crazy we just suspend them overhead all over the place in the right-of-way where trucks and shit can hit them.
You’d think with modern LED setups this would be null and void. It’s quite wild to see a lot of older schooled growers still using sodium lamps and other high heat, high energy lighting fixtures and getting caught, wasting energy, etc.
Now days modern LEDs are multi fold more efficient. You’d also think that if someone was doing bad deeds illegally they’d be more inclined to stick to a more strict standard.
I guess criminals never did have much standards… Organized crime excluded and even then some organized crime syndicates aren’t fully organized in a manner that detection is impossible. They just aren’t a nuisance enough to warrant the big league agencies. Local LEOs are definitely picking up new tech and evolving faster as the money rolls in these last 10 years.
Lighting is only part of the issue. In order to get a consistently reproducible product, growers also try to maintain a consistent temperature, humidity, and airflow. All of which quickly adds up to massive energy consumption. Weed grows best in mild humidity and pretty high temperatures. Which means that in the winter, they end up heating and humidifying the entire house to what would essentially be tropical levels. And in the summer, they’re worried about consistent airflow and dehumidifying. And dehumidifiers eat a lot of energy.
There’s a reason cops use thermal imaging to find grow houses. Under infrared, they light up like a beacon. Cops can just fly a helicopter around town, and flag any houses that look abnormal:
I know. And they do it now days with no warrants in the US which is supposed to be illegal. All other points are very valid.
But generally lights don’t equate heat with modern LEDs is all I was saying unlike old halogen or sodium bulbs.
A lot of growers use basements which obscures a lot of thermal imaging. Including under ground shipping containers, cellars, and more. But your example images are spot on from real people that got caught. I still think profiling should be illegal and there should be some strict laws in place to catch criminals the right ways but rant for another time.
Most modern people don’t have access to all that advanced tech, don’t care, feel it should be legal, poor, average. Not some criminal enterprise. Thanks for uploading the photos though for others to see.
Except the numbers that you’re talking about are radically different from the numbers they are talking about. What you’re talking about is something that was probably 10 times or 20 times the average consumption, not 3 times. You’re also talking about something where they’re actually was a clear physical danger and crimes obviously being committed.
I don’t think many people would be particularly surprised if the power company were finding people stealing power and calling the cops on them.
Thisss!!!
Using more electricity than average? Get automatically raided!
Yeah sounds pretty fucked up to me.
not quite – it’s if you’re using 3.5x more electricity than average. Still seems fucked up from my lemmy-eye view though.
Police raided my house because our electricity usage was 4x my neighbors.
They ‘surveilled’ my house and then got a search warrant which said they saw Metal Halide lights, which, in this pig’s expert opinion are only used for growing Marijuana (they’re used for literally everything that grows under the sun). Tinfoil on the window, which “is used in marijuana grow operations” and because I had a window AC unit “used in grow houses to cool the lights”.
When they showed up despite not there obviously not being a grow operations, they destroyed my house, punched holes in the walls, unseated my toilets, pulled my grandfather’s military burial flag out of it’s case and unfolded it. Then left it on the ground, stepping on it as they searched. They also stole $125 in cash off of my desk.
They found a few saltwater tanks full of corals and 4 people with gaming PCs. There was no money to cover the damages, no apology, just ‘well you guys are free to go’ and then they left.
It doesn’t matter to them if their flawed methods have false positives, they’re protected from any liability personal or otherwise.
It’s incredible you can’t get any money for all the damages they cause…
Remember kids: if you see something, no you didn’t. Move along and mind your business.
Damn right
Domestic abusers appreciate your support.
Fuck those people, we wasn’t talking about those people. Common sense something or another.
Yeah, it was a long shot. Hoping that it would highlight the toxic stupidity of that kind of wannabe gansta memes.
Wanna know the difference between growing weed indoors and growing anything else indoors?
Nothing. Fuck off. I’m growing extremely hot peppers indoors with my kilowatts of LEDs.
Yeah, despite the wording, I suspect they are looking at the patterns of use with smart meters rather than just “high amounts?” Grow op houses would be easy to see, as they only use power when the lights are on, flat usage, because no one is actually living there. Do you run lights 24x7 with indoor growing? idk. The trouble is, any system like this will catch a few, then they will relax the constraints to “catch more” and boom, now you have false positives. The criminals will also figure it out and mask their usage better by cycling banks of lighting, using batteries, parking some EVs in the driveway or whatever. That cat-and-mouse game will just see increasing privacy invasion and more false positives.
It’s definitely the patterns. What I’m saying is the patterns are not any different for cannabis versus any other photoperiod plant. Cannabis isn’t the only thing you veg under 18/6 and flower under 12/12 light cycles. It’s not illegal to grow plants indoors and if I spend 5kW doing it every day that’s nobody’s business but my own. I’ll use my joules however I feel.
That said, it seems like the way to defeat this type of analysis would be to invest in batteries so you can always have a constant 24h drain rather than 5kW turning on every day at the same time for 18 or 12 hours.
Of course modern criminals are smart. /s
The good ones are. The poor ones suffer the consequences of their own actions. With modern tech crime advances faster under no regulations than laws can. The problem is uneducated criminals lol
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Yeah, batteries or cycling different banks at different overlapping intervals so the the household draw averages out to a more reasonable usage pattern. Easy for the criminals to defeat, resulting in false-positives in their detection scheme.
You seem to know a lot about we…, I mean, electricity. Tell us more 🤣🤣
By the way, I’m just joking, as these companies are just getting more dystopian by the second.
My gaming desktop and basement server uses enough power to be flagged as a grow. Fuck these guys gonna hassle me for being a geek.
Cops:
We suspect you have a grow operation.
Nerds:
I’ve certainly been growing the size of my LAN.
i remember there were false flags that were raised before when crypto mining operations were flagged as an illegal weed operation
Is growing illegal in California? Even in Connecticut which has rather draconian legal cannabis laws you’re allowed to grow for personal use
Are they fucking stupid? If your customer is in jail then they wont be giving you money for your product.
I keep several exotic pets and plants none of which are pot but even if it was mind your fucking business. it is none of your concern why my power bill is stupidly high.
Yeah and he’ll lose the house and whoever moves in pays the bill
Sounds like time to run either a food grow op or Folding@Home on a schedule to create false alarms
I’m sure that you’ll be spending no less than $500/month on electricity before you even show up on the list.
Who the hell grows indoors in California? It has the best climate for outdoor cannabis
Someone not having all that much of a garden or suspect that the plant will be gone before harvest if kept outside? Maybe?
Does California not have a legal personal growing law?
Ideally, set up a battery and inverter system in your house, and turn the charging rate up or down depending on what other electric devices you are using at any given moment. Idea is to keep your power consumption exactly the same regardless of what you are doing at home. That way you give no information to the power company.
“this one house has perfectly consistent power usage. That’s suspicious”
Would this monitoring not be on the total power consumption vs hourly/daily?
I have a number of indoor grow systems that have LED lights on a timer. I guess now I need to start worrying about the police raiding my house to seize my crop of lettuce and tomatoes.
I thought the LEDs use way less power than the grow lights of old, I guess not!
Lower power use of LEDs just means you can have a larger operation with the same electrical connection.
Also dehumidifiers/air conditioning makes up a big part of the energy use as well. The plants transpire a ton of humidity into the air, which has to go somewhere, and the lights create a ton of heat (even LEDs), which has to be lowered as well.
During flower your lights will also be turned on for exactly 12 hours, and then turned off for exactly 12 hours. That’s an extremely easy pattern for a modern smart meter to recognize. Although that could be hidden somewhat by having a lot of small tents and staggering the timing of the lights, so they don’t all turn on and off at the exact same time. Makes working on the plants a lot less convenient though, since you must never open the tent while the lights are turned off, as light exposure during the dark period can cause hermies, which will ruin your harvest
It’s still the main power drain in a grow room. I use custom LED strips designed to minimize power waste and for 8 plant pots i have to use at least 250W of power just on the lighting.
FBI OPEN UP!!!
I meant plant pots not pot plants!
Electricity grid is like cloud compute.
Better to self-host and run solar or alternative power.
My guess is that the timing and consumption rates are so regularly frequent that it becomes obvious when comparing historical periods.
