How To Identify Furnace & Water Heater On Electric Panel (1 Viewer)

We're getting a generator installed and we need to identify which breaker the furnace and water heater are on.  Problem is they are not labeled.

Thoughts on how to identify them?

flip one off and see what happens. 

/thread. 

Go to furnace. Peel back the wire. Hold a paperclip across the wire. The breaker that flips is your furnace one. Hth

Turn the furnace on

turn each breaker off individually until the fan shuts off.

The water heater will be slightly trickier unless it has the small indicator lights of them have now. If not you might to get a small meter like This or This voltage tester pen

Silly question but shouldn’t the electrician be able to figure this out for you? He will have a meter already and shouldn’t take him and his helper (or you) helping flip the breakers.

Oh, gas furnace and hot water.  No electric maybe?

Furnace depends on if it is millivolt or electronic ignition.  Hot water heater no if it is gas...most likely has a pilot light.

Turn off all the breakers.  Then start turning them on one by one.

Is your basement excessively hot?

Spend 2 hours with friend / wife / son and get all of your breakers labeled.  Here's what I did a year ago in my 100 year old house.

-Go room by room and appliance by appliance.  Have someone in basement and someone in room.  Flip breakers off until the outlet / light / apppliance shut off.  Write all of this down on paper what circuit each is on.  Don't assume anything - check every outlet and every light.  Use a nightlight or something easy to plug in

-On outlets take outlet plate off wall, write circuit number on back of plate.  Will help you in future.  

-Once finished you will probably find you have a circuit with nothing attached to it.  Or so it seems...  Shut the breaker off and within a day when your garbage disposal or whatever it not working you'll figure out what that breaker does.

There are free templates on google docs, that's what I used.  Publish it on your google doc and print and post at the box

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1LObDyMnhoWQFK_5oYVnXMxFr3aByNpGhE2akYuKuLMs/edit#gid=0