thanks for all the responses guys. now please allow me to respond with a little devil's advocacy:
many of you have supported the claim that 1000 watts per room is a safe amount of electricity to run...i too have read this a few times, but it seems to always be in the context of how much power you can run through a room without blowing a circuit or overloading, not how much power you can run in a room before you become noticeable to the authorities. the latter wouldn't make sense, as i believe that the utilities/police have no way of monitoring your electricity consumption per room, only your total draw (i.e. how you divided that consumption about your house shouldn't matter).
also, i think it is a widely held misconception that the
amount of electricity is what gets you caught. this might be true for people who have truly massive commercial grows, but for growers running only 4000 watts or so, it isn't the amount of power you're running so much as the fact that it is clicking on and off abruptly every 12 hours exactly. this is suspicious, and anyone posted at a local utility with instructions of what to look for will know to zero in on it. there are a number of legitimate journalistic sources (or as legitimate as you can get in regards to marijuana cultivation) that have mentioned this kind of screening taking place in Canada and the US as part of a cooperative effort between law enforcement and utilities to track down grow ops. there has even been a number reports of computer monitoring systems programmed to detect and report the unique power spike that occurs when ballasted light systems turn on and off on a regular pattern. one such article comes from cannabis culture magazine and can be found here (scroll down to the power narc section):
http://www.cannabisculture.com/articles/3268.html
now i know there will be some people that will say "wait a minute, i use 6 1000 watt lights and i've been fine!" to that the answer is simple- the strategies used to identify grow ops varies from place to place, and can be very different across different countries/provinces/states/cities. you may be lucky enough to live in a low-detection area, or you may still not have enough power running to meet your individual supplier's criteria for what's suspicious. or maybe you just havn't been nabbed yet?
these might sound like a bunch of facts designed to make everyone horribly paranoid, but ii don't intend it as such. rather it's just a series of
possibilities that i hope will help growers, when considered, to make more educated decisions in regards to expanding their grows.