[Dandaweedman]

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High power consumption is an emblem of marijuana grow ops. And a former Calgary police officer who left the service in 2007 has developed a special meter to detect those stealing electricity.

Roger Morrison's technology has already led police to four marijuana grows in the Chestermere area. Last year, during a test on a neighbourhood of 603 homes, six of Morrison's meters found nine grow operations in just one hour.

From the outside, only three of those 13 homes had any visible signs they housed a grow op, he said.

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"That was extremely surprising for me," Morrison said. "That was an extreme wake-up call for me and some of the guys in the unit that maybe we don't really know how vast this problem is."

Morrison's meter detects atypical consumption between the primary line and the transformers that feed 80 to 100 homes in a neighbourhood.

The technology immediately notifies the utility company when a primary line shows a home with excessive consumption.

Someone from the utility can then test the particular transformers and find out which residence is the culprit.

"If you turn your hot tub on, that's not going to trigger this," Morrison said. "If you weld for two hours, that's not going to trigger this. It has to be a consistent, large power draw."

He said Canada has become a haven for marijuana production: "There's no way the amount of marijuana that we're producing in Canada can be consumed by Canadians.

"A vast majority of it is getting shipped down to the States where the profits are so much larger."

Meanwhile, tracking power consumption that's not stolen has helped push out residential marijuana grows in some jurisdictions of British Columbia.

Three years ago, the Surrey fire service began an experiment.

"I just was so frustrated with the lack of response from the system -- (it) did not seem to be deterring -- that we invented something different to achieve the same result and that's getting (grow operations) out of our neighbourhoods," Surrey fire chief Len Garis said in a recent interview.

The department obtained power consumption data from BC Hydro on homes that were suspected of growing marijuana.

Safety investigations based on high power consumption found nearly 94 per cent of the homes had serious electrical problems -- in almost all cases, they housed a grow op.

In 2006, B.C. passed legislation requiring BC Hydro to provide the addresses of residences with unusually high power consumption.

The first set of data in Surrey revealed almost 1,000 homes that met the threshold and were the likely abodes of marijuana grow ops.

Notices are posted on the doors, warning of an inspection in 48 hours. And while that gives time for growers to move out their crop, the safety inspections prove an annoyance and disruption to the trade.

That has prodded many growers to simply leave Surrey, Garin said, noting complaints concerning grow ops dropped by 38 per cent last year.

"It seems to be so that they're just simply moving out, because it's all about the money," Garin said. "And if they're not able to produce a crop undisturbed, they're going to lose money, their investment."