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.
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.
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
- 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.
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.
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 thought the LEDs use way less power than the grow lights of old, I guess not!
My guess is that the timing and consumption rates are so regularly frequent that it becomes obvious when comparing historical periods.
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.
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.
Is growing illegal in California? Even in Connecticut which has rather draconian legal cannabis laws you’re allowed to grow for personal use
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?
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.
Would this monitoring not be on the total power consumption vs hourly/daily?
“this one house has perfectly consistent power usage. That’s suspicious”
This is a drawback to municipal power supply. Not that private companies all over the US haven’t also ratted out growers, but PG&E would fuckin never lol.
Another great reason to get solar panels
I’ve got friends who grow indoor, and have a pretty big solar array, and their PGE bill is still fucking high. You need hella batteries I guess, but those are expensive.
This sucks because it’s an invasion of privacy. But it also sucks because SMUD is an otherwise great utility.
