O/T Leaking electricity

My electrical bills are atrocious! I have buried electrical cables and think maybe one is slightly damaged. Could a buried cable surrounded by wet earth with a pinhole size hole in the insulation allow power to go into the earth? Therefore making my electrical bills so high. All suggestions appreciated, and how would one go about finding the damaged spot?

Assuming you have a wheel meter on the incoming wires, shut everything off in all buildings (except clocks and the tiny controllers that are hard wired, (or shut off mains at the sub panels). then by shutting off breakers at the main panel one at a time, while someone watches the wheel. when it spins you have found the drain. Jim

Your electrician or electric company will have a device that can detect leaks and locate them.

The short answer to your question is yes.
However the underground cable must be on your side of the meter. Do you have outbuildings which are powered from the house with underground wiring?
If you do not then that's not where it's going. If the only underground wire is between the transformer and the house (where the meter is) then it may be leaking but you don't pay for it. Given you have no underground wire after the meter dtart turning off circuits until the meter stops spinning and you will find the culprit.

Don't really know about finding a leak but you should probably be able to measure a gradient if it is there, by putting an extension on one probe of a digital multimeter. You will need to stick them in the ground a little depending on moisture. I was able to feel a little charge from one leg to another once when fighting a brush fire started by downed elec. wires. Do you have a well for water? a bad foot valve will run your bill up.

We had a bunch of problems here in the past - power company had been installing poor grounds. This too could cause excessive electrical usage. Dairy farmers were given fits with stray voltages.
But to answer your question, yes, bad insulation could allow electrical leakage, driving your bill up. Need to check over entire wiring complex for un-used appliances, etc. that may be drawing electricity. Unplug everything... See if meter is still turning.

Yes, its possible that a high resistance short that still isnt drawing sufficient current to trip a breaker can run up your electric bill. If you can get into your distribution panel or switch etc with an ammeter you could measure the current and locate a faulty shorting branch circuit. There could be a Line (UnGrounDED Conductor) to Neutral (GrounDED Conductor) current path or perhaps a Line (UnGrounDED Conductor) to Mother Earth current path of high enough resistance so the breaker doesnt trip yet current flows thus your electric meter registers and your resultant BILL. Turning off and on breakers one at a time and looking for currrent flow can also help locate the branch circuit at fault.

John T

Do you have an electric water heater? After we sold our old farmhouse, the buyer complained about huge electric bills. We had not had such problems and suggested that maybe there was either electric leakage (but it was all overhead wiring and not likely) or something was staying on a lot more than it should.

What they later told us was that one of the water heater elements went bad somehow and it stayed on all the time. The water heater was old, at least 35 years old at the time, so they just replaced the whole thing. Their next power bill was about half of what the previous bill had been.

Our power bills are highest in the late Summer when we have air conditioning on and also pump a lot of water to keep the yard and garden green. If you have a well pump, you might check to see if it is cycling more often than it should be. You could have a pipe leaking somewhere, or maybe the check valve is allowing the water to leak back down into the well when the pump kicks off. BOTH of those problems have happened at my place, and they make the system use lots more electricity than it should.

As one of the posters suggested, the problem(s) must be on your side of the electric meter, since if there was a power leak somewhere on the other side of the meter, it would not show up in your power bill. It seems reasonable to me that if an underground wire was nicked, that power could leak to ground in damp soil. That is why I always run cables I plan to bury through conduit in my very rocky soil. But the cables I have buried have heavy insulation and are rated for direct burial and should be OK if they were buried carefully and have not been disturbed.

I believe that there are meters available to check if power continues to go through a circuit even though the load is turned off. Using such a meter to test buried lines would be a lot easier than digging them up, although I do not know if there is anything that could tell where the problem area is.

If you are not used to working on electrical systems, this might be a good time to discuss your problem with an electrician, and see if they can figure out what is wrong. Be careful, electricity can be very dangerous if you don"t know what you are doing. But I would first check the water heater. Good luck!

Are your lines buried after or before your electric meter?

I had a water softener leaking to the sewer all the time

Yes,

It will get wet, conduct, then dry out, stop, and repeat the cycle. It will eventually turn into aluminum oxide at the penetration.

The bills can be quite high.

How electricity works is a real study. The "hot" is always looking for a ground to leak to. If there is a path it will find it! Sometimes
the path is very hard to find (troubleshoot). I always looked for a falty ground first. Like some suggested turn everything off and watch the meter and turn things on one at a time as you watch for the movement.
I one time at a customer's home found a " romex cable" laying in the yard. It was hooked to a switch for a yard light that was never installed for several years. About 5 feet of the romex was "melted" by the switch left on in wet conditions. The wire just burned up slowly in wet/ snow conditions like a fuse. Wish I had taken a photo. joe

Amprobe clamp on ammeter is a lifesaver for this. Look for wire going into ground with fair amount of current showing. Turn off breaker and see if it stops. Sometimes switch hot and neutral for temp cure. (that is switch at breaker and bus bar. Only try if youknow what you are doing. Dave

If the leak is bad enough to show up on your electric bill, I'd expect you to be tripping circuit breakers.

It's easy enough to check for a leaky cable. You have to open the breakers feeding the cable and disconnect ALL loads at the other end. Then measure resistance between each hot conductor and both neutral and ground conductors. (Of course neutral and ground should be connected back at the main, but it's best not to assume these things.) The resistance should be less than 10 megohms, but will have to get down to less than a a hundred ohms before you'll see any significant drain. A resistance of a few thousand ohms means you probably have a problem when it gets wet. By the way, don't use the continuity/diode check of your multimeter; it doesn't actually measure resistance.

A "Kill-a-Watt" meter is a good tool for finding 120V appliances that are wasting power.

I would get an amprobe and start at your meter. Shut your main off and check for currrent draw, then keep working your way downstream - wherever you have underground feeders, open the breaker on the downstream end of it and check for current. I have a friend that has a similar problem with an underground service. He shut off his main and the meter kept spinning It turned out the cable was damaged between the meter and the house
Good luck