It's been some time since I wired a house, but I don't think I ever assumed a home would have LED lights when I wired it, and then overloaded circuits as a result. Because that would be a shitty way to lay out a house (you never know what homeowners are going to install). It's like the people that tell you they're going to buy relatively small light fixtures, you wire for that, and then they show up with ridiculously large lighting fixtures that have so many bulbs that your circuits can't handle it.
That being said, yeah, LED bulbs might help. But having to do that just to keep breakers from tripping would make me nervous about the entire house.
The fact he's only running into this when he has a lot of stuff left on for a prolonged period of time makes me wonder if 1) circuits are 'too full', and/or 2) if there was never an allowance for 'continuous duty' when they sized circuits, and they still just used standard '80%' rated breakers and loaded everything to the max.
As an example, let's say I'm casually laying out a 15A circuit using standard breakers. If all my loads are non-continuous, I can technically use a standard 15A breaker for 15A worth of loads. Where the 80% rating comes in, is when you have continuous loads (3+ hours, technically). If you have an entire circuit of continuous loads, you'd only be able (by UL and by NEC) to 'load up' that circuit breaker with 12A of load. But if you have 50%/50% on a general purpose mixed circuit, instead of calculating out 100%+125% you'd just do what I, and everyone else I've ever known, would do: put 12A on that circuit and not worry about whether stuff is continuous or not, because homeowners do weird shit and you never know when someone is going to leave literally everything in their house on for 3 days straight.
How do you feel about spending money on tools? For $100-$125 you can get a multimeter with an "amp clamp". Then you can reproduce what was happening and check to see how much current each circuit is drawing at the breaker.
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When you say shit is tripping out after a prolonged period, my first guess is that the circuit breakers may be getting hot, and they're staying tripped until they cool off. I'd look for 12A+ on a 15A circuit, and 16A+ on any 20A. If this is what is happening, you should be able to actually feel the heat, and with a meter, see how much current they're handling. If you are getting 12A+ or 16A+ respectively, then yeah, this is probably going to happen each and every time you turn all that shit back on again for hours at a time.
Your options are:
- do as
lurkingdirk
suggested and try to lower how much current your general purpose circuits use
- simply don't leave everything on for hours at a time (this might solve the issue)
possibly change certain breakers out to those that are rated for 100% continuous loads (I'm not sure they even make any 15A breakers with this rating?)- split some circuits in 'half' and feed each half from its own breaker (this would take a lot of tracing out and rewiring)
- possibly add some dedicated circuits if you have some serious kit (like entertainment systems). I've wired single 2-gang boxes with 2 receptacles, on a 12g 20A circuit for people before.
My 3rd answer really isn't serious, because we've only been talking circuit breakers. If you were able to find a 15A breaker that was rated for 100% continuous loads, the 14g wire in your existing circuit wouldn't be. Meaning your breaker might then hold, but the wire in your wall is going to start getting hot as well. Generally you need to 'upsize' both the circuit conductors, as well as circuit breakers. I would treat 15A of continuous loads as 18.75 rounded up to 19, which is above what I'd even want to put on a 20A breaker with 12G wire. This is why it's SO MUCH EASIER to just size your 15/20A circuits to below 12/16A at all times.
