A Theft of Electricity
Set of electricity in Hawaii
2012 John A Peters' Stories
My all-expenses-paid work trip to Hawaii in October 2012
This is a “Who Done it mystery.”
A pretty young woman from Saipan named EJ called me on my business cell phone. I was in my home office in San Francisco. She wanted me to help her with a problem in Hawaii. She was willing to pay for my consulting time. When she came to my home office here in San Francisco, she brought a 3 inch tall stack of color photographs of her rented house in Hawaii. There were many many photos. Pix of the power pole, the transformer, the wires to the house, the electric meters, the wires under the eaves and on the outside of the house and on and on.
She offered to pay my way to Oahu to investigate the theft of her electricity. I asked her “Why don’t you have a local electrician solve the problem?” Her response was “Oh no, Hawaii is very small place.”
She had been staying temporarily in New York to help a sick relative. She wanted to know why her electric bills in Hawaii were higher than when she lived there! She asked me to go to Hawaii and investigate and document my findings. Of course I was interested. I said “Yes I can do that.” We talked for two hours here in my office and she paid me for my time at my normal electrician rates and went on her way.
She told me she will get back to me later. Weeks went by and I did not hear anything, so I wondered if she had changed her mind. I more or less forgot about her and the free trip to Hawaii.
A month or so later she called to say the arrangements were made. She asked “Can you leave in four days from now?” She assured Cathy, my wife that she would take good care of me and that Cathy’s interests were foremost in her mind and “I would be protected”. (Smile) I cleared it with Cathy and the next day EJ sent an email with the airplane tickets, so I started getting ready to go to Hawaii, a place that I love.
It is only a 5-1/4 hour flight. EJ picked me up in her car at the Honolulu Airport. She graciously offered me the choice of riding to Waikiki via the H1 freeway or the old highway scenic route. I chose the scenic route. She was good at pointing out the places of interest along the way. In Waikiki we drove in the entrance to the parking garage (around and around & around,) up the parking garage ramp. Finally we parked in her spot and walked to the elevator.
We were on the 8th floor of the garage but when we entered the elevator and I was surprised to find that we were actually on the 10th floor of the adjacent condominium tower. We took the elevator up to the 21st floor. There was a fine view of the Ala Wai Canal, Manoa Valley and St Louis Heights. It was a very nice rented condo and unexpectedly upscale.
I was surprised when she offered me a “free day” on my own. We were scheduled to go to the house the next day when my job would be to look for evidence of power theft. I was surprised and glad to find out that I was able to be a tourist for a day. Even more shocking was the fact that she let me borrow her car. As you can imagine if I had gotten into an accident and was injured, she would be stuck with taking care of me, so I was very thankful and careful about driving her car.
I drove up to Mount Tantalus. On the way up, there are many curves and on one of them which curved up into the left two skateboarders came speeding down, leaning to the right with one hand, dragging a swung around the curve. After they passed, I realized if they had spun out, they would go right under the car and that would be bad news. I checked out the rige top area where you can see the whole city of Honolulu. I also drove to the observation point. Many good memories of my dog Jake and living in the Kahaloa house in Manoa Valley in the 60s
I drove up to Manoa Falls, parked and hiked all the way up to the waterfall. Then I drove back down out of Manoa Valley and up to the top of St. Louis Heights where the Warhol Park has a wonderful view of Manoa Valley. It is so very natural and nice there that I felt compelled to pick a bunch of cigarette butts and throw them in the garbage can since it was such a beautiful place. Then I drove down through the residental areas of the mountain to the University of Hawaii Campus.
PS There is a mansion on the hill in the valley behind the UH. I lived there for almost a year during the seven years that I lived in Hawaii 1961-1968.
I continued to play tourist as I drove down the valley to Honolulu and then around the side of Punch Bowl Cemetery. Next I drove up the curvy road that goes up and around Mount Tantalus. It is a long drive with lots of greenery. The curves were great to ride on a cycle back when I lived there. I had a motorcycle then. Lots of old memories flooded back, all of them good.
The next day EJ we left Waikiki and drove east past Diamond Head. We turned inland and drove up in to a nice local residential neighborhood and her rented house. I did a lot of looking around. Somethings were unusual to say the least!
Why is there white powder on the floor?
EJ told me she had been worried about someone coming in to her house while she was gone, so she sprinkled cake flour on the floor. Her thinking was that if someone came in while she was away, they would leave footprints. She told me she was planning to move out and would I help her? Of course I said yes. The flower on the floor was quite a bit of a mess to clean up. She told me some one had previously jimmied the door locks so she had them changed to high security Medeco locks.
When we looked in the closet, most of her clothes were nicely covered with the clear plastic that you get from the cleaners. Why were some of the covers pulled up? Was someone looking through the closet for the best cloths to steal?
The upstairs meter is on the back of the house. I turned off all the breakers. Someone turned the breakers back on when we were away. It must be the renters in the lower unit This shows that they were tapping her power.
The downstairs unit had it’s electric meter on the side of the house. It looked like it had been added or “cut in”. The main meter for the upstairs original house is in back. Why were the meters not located together like is normal and usual? No one was home in the lower unit so I I carefully poked around in the crawl space underneath the house. n the lower unit. It looked like the electric meter was added much later than the original house meter. I saw knob and tube wires running around in what was like a crawl space in back of the lower unit. The wires came down from her meter and ran forward towards he lower unit. They were powering the floor plugs above. It all looked normal. So why was her power bill so high when she was not home for several months? She pointed out some PVC conduit on the other side of the yard that she thought was suspicious but it looked like garden sprinkler pipes to me. She was disappointed.
Later EJ asked me how was I doing and I said “I am having trouble finding any evidence of theft.” She told me “Don’t look for where it was done, look for how you would do it if you were going to steal the power.” That gave me new insight. As soon as I looked for a way to steal the power, I found out how it may have been done.
There were two clothes dryers in the utility area.
Each clothes dryer has a male plug cord and cap and there were two 220V wall plugs. It is very easy to switch the upstairs dryer plug into the downstairs receptacle and vice versa. But of course this doesn’t leave any evidence.
As I was poking around in back of the basement apartment laundry areas, when (surprise) a young man stuck his head out of the door that led into the dirt floor laundry area underneath the house. I immediately suspected him. He merely said hello and popped back inside. That was just a little disconcerting. Since he looked like a surfer, (or something like a starving artist?) he probably had reason to try to save on his power bill. Maybe he was involved in the power theft?
I continued inspecting the knob & tube wiring when my eyes were drawn to some rolls of toilet paper tucked up between the floor joists. That is odd, I thought. I pulled down a roll or two and saw that the knob and tube wires had modern plastic electrical tape, covering a place that did not have any reason to be there. There was a “tap” or splice.
The tap was not covered with the “friction tape” a type of tape that was used on the rest of the original wiring from the old days.
I noticed the hot water heater had a cable long enough to reach and tap in to the knob & tube lines from the upstairs meter.
The orange Romex was used to restore the hot water power to the proper meter.It could be easily switched on to the other meter buy simply pulling out the staples and swinging the wire over and tapping it onto the open wiring (It runs like a clothes line) coming from EJ’s meter. Anyone with simple tools could strip off the insulation and tap onto the upstairs knob & tube circuit and get free power. Ah-ha! I started taking pictures while hoping the down stairs renter would not reappear.
The next day we returned to find a padlock on the door to the laundry area underneath the house. EJ asked me to take scads and scads (hundreds) of pictures all around the house and the grounds. I am an ex-professional photographer, but this is getting ridiculous, why so many?
Later that evening, when we were both there the surfer boy confronted her and said “You can’t take pictures of my house.” I told him “It’s not your house, it is our house too and we can take any pictures we want.” He got kind of abusive and in EJ’s face, so she called the Honolulu Police. They showed up fairly quickly. I did not know that A
EJ wanted a report to be filed, so I tried to settle things down and not much happened and the policeman said “Since nothing happened here, there is nothing to report.” EJ was not happy with me. She wanted something on paper.
I assumed EJ would do something about the power theft. I asked her if she was going to act on it and she said yes she was. i still haven’t seen any action. Why not?
Back at the condo she drew up a really long handwritten agreement and had me sign it. The point of it was that I was to be prepared to document what I saw and and to testify but nothing ever came of it. Oh well, sometimes you have to let things go. It’s too bad, because she’s a very nice young lady and she was taken advantage of. She wanted to do everything correctly to the extent that she even purchased a brand new refrigerator For the rental unit because the old one stopped working while she was away. She did not even ask the landlord to help pay for it. I asked why not? answer – Hawaii is a very small place. Translation. She wanted to maintain a squeaky clean reputation. What can I say?
She hired a family of house cleaners to make the place super clean so the landlord would be happy and the records would show she received all of her security deposit with no deductions or pretensions. After the cleaners finished she realized the Medico locks were too expensive to leave behind so we called a locksmith. It was almost dark, on a Friday evening after 5 PM and the only the locksmith we could find was coming from the other side of the Island. We waited for the locksmith who finally arrived after dark. During the wait there since there was no furniture, we stretched out side-by-side on the hardwood floor and as the Hawaiians say, we “Talked Story” to pass the time.
The next day was a free day and I rented a bicycle and toured Waikiki. I rode out to Diamond Head. On the way back I went out to the sandy parking area in front of some of the hotels that face the ocean. I returned via Kapiolani Park and the Ala Wai Canal. I remember sitting on one of the benches and relishing the Hawaiian sunshine and the good feeling of being in Hawaii.
(C) John A. Peters 2020, 2025 It took place October 16-21, 2012
