Not every home is going to be integrated with everything according to how you want. When you move to a new home, one problem that you may find is regarding the lights. Lighting will be insufficient in the house, and you need to fix them as early as possible. Unless you have a good electrician helping you, you have to figure out for yourself. Therefore, we are here to discuss a perfect topic, and it is how many lights on a 15 amp circuit can handle.

If you have never worked with electricity or do not have much experience, you will get stuck with how many lights you can put on your home using the circuit breaker. Even the amateur electrician will have a problem figuring out this solution. You must be cautious when you are dealing with the electricity in your house. That is why, without correctly understand and be sure of all the variables of the circumstances; you should not play with electrical problems.

Learn: How Many Lights on a 15 Amp Circuit breaker

Electricity is one of the essential parts of a home. You will not be able to live well inside your house if it does not have proper lighting. It is always better to have some basic knowledge about electrical things in your house. Because there can be times when you may not be able to find an electrician in a time of crisis, in those times, your knowledge about it could come in handy. Besides, who wants to waste some bucks on things when you can do it yourself? Working on the electricity in your house can be fun and a significant part of being your hobby.

Keeping those things in your mind, we will show you how many lights a 15 amp circuit breaker can have. This is the knowledge that everything needs to know. But before we move onto the actual solution, we want you to have problem knowledge about all the things you are going to be dealing with. This section is for those who may not know all the functions of the items related to the topic.

Circuit Breaker

Before you start putting lights all over your house, you need to know the circuit breaker and its works. A circuit breaker is an automated switch that will save your primary electrical circuit when the current flow exceeds or overflows. As too much electricity on the primary circuit can break and cause accidents, the circuit breaker is there to protect the primary circuit from anything to happen. In a home, there is one main circuit breaker attached to the main circuit. The direct circuit breaking is divided into smaller ones.

Electrical Panel

The electrical panel is your primary electrical circuit. The electrical panel has the mainline for electricity attach to it, and the current comes from there. The line divides into various branches connected to the main circuit breaker.

Amperage (amp)

Amperage is the amount of current that is flowing through one fixture of light.

How Many Lights on a 15 Amp Circuit 2

Wattage (watt)

Wattage is the measuring unit for electrical power. Watt is calculated by volt multiplied by the amp.

Now that you have the basic ideas of the things you are going to work with, you start learning about the primary matter you are here for, which is how many lights on a 15 amp circuit breaker can have.

The first thing you need to find out is the capacity of the circuit, which you can know by multiplying the amp and volt. If the circuit is 15 amp, the chances are that it is working under 120volts. So, if you multiply them, it will be 1800 watts of capacity. To give you a better understanding of the matter, if your circuit breaker had 20 amp working under 120volts, then the ability of the circuit was going to be 2400 watts.

Now that you know the information, you need to find out how much watts worth of light you are going to use. If you are going to use 1000 watts worth of light, then you can easily understand the capacity of the light you are going to have, which should be 18 lights.

But one thing you have to know that you should not use the full capacity of the circuit. According to the safety regulation, one should only use 80% of the power of a circuit. If you use 80% of your 1800 watts, then you will have 1440 watts of power left to use. If the lights have 100 watts, then you can use 14 lights on your 15 amp circuit breaker.

But that is not everything. It is the calculation if there are no other electrical devices attached to the circuit breaker. So, what should you do if there are other devices? In that case, you need to find out what else is attached and count the amount of wattage they need. Minus everything and uses the remaining wattage for lights.

Safety Caution

There are reasons why you should always measure the amp and everything before you start to light up everything. It is because if you end up using too many lights that exceed the capacity, the main circuit will have an overload of electricity. This can cause the circuit to break and start a fire, which can be very dangerous for your home.

Final Thoughts

As you can already tell why you need to measure things up when you are working around electricity. Electricity is one of the most needed items of our life, but if they are not handled properly, they will end up ruining our home and endangering our life. So, before you start putting on the lights in your room, you need to see if the circuit breaker has any remaining capacity to handle. We hope our tips for how many lights on a 15 amp circuit breaker will come in handy for you, and you will be able to safely light up your home and enjoy everything.