A young Romanian thought he had every little detail covered when he started growing cannabis in a Bucharest apartment, but he was wrong. He forgot about the huge amount of electricity needed to grow these plants, and this is what gave him away.

Sebastian Niculae, 27, rented an apartment in Bucharest to grow cannabis, reports local Adevarul. He took every precaution measure to avoid being caught by the police, meaning that he even sealed the front door to keep the smell from going out, but he forgot one important thing: the high electricity consumption, which made the local authorities suspicious.

Because of all the systems he had installed for the cannabis crop, the electricity consumption in the apartment he rented was up to 130 times higher than the average consumption registered by the other apartments.

In a first phase, the police officers checked the electricity meter and discovered that the apartment in question had a consumption of 96 kilowatts in just five days. They kept checking the meter and saw that the consumption increased to 683 kilowatts in 28 days. Thus, considering that this kind of consumption can’t be generated by household appliances usually found in one’s home, the policemen decided to notify the Directorate for Investigating Organized Crime and Terrorism (DIICOT), which started monitoring Sebastian Niculae.

Following the investigation, the prosecutors found that the young man was not only growing cannabis in that apartment, but he was also selling the drug in Ploiesti, his hometown. He was officially charged with drug trafficking in repeated form, and risks a prison sentence of up to 15 years if the court finds him guilty.

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Irina Popescu, irina.popescu@romania-insider.com