We bought a house built in 1990 in CA and have been having issues w/ lights flickering when other appliances/fixtures are run. When I turn the powder room fan OFF, a lamp connected to a receptacle 20 feet away in my kitchen flickers. Today, I had a fan connected to the same receptacle with the lamp, and when I shut that fan off it flickered again. Upstairs, when an A/C cycles on in one of the bedrooms, the lights in a completely separate bathroom flicker.
On top of this, single outlets in 2-outlet receptacles randomly stop and start working. One day I'll go to plug something in and one of the outlets don't work. We had an electrician over from the home insurance the sellers left, who used some device on the flickering receptacles and said nothing was wrong and it was "normal."
When I was flipping circuit breakers to match them to my kitchen outlets, I found that ALL the kitchen receptacles (6) were attached to one breaker — titled "Kitchen." But when I tried to trip that by running 6000+ watts of appliances across receptacles, it didn't trip.
Best Answer
It's not normal, and you probably have loose connections somewhere. As usual in my experience, "Home insurance" looks like a scam that does not solve anything. Send incompetent who sees nothing wrong, laugh all the way to the bank. Won't pay for a competent serviceman, they have their own special people who are selectively blind.
If (as Jack asks in his comment) the Kitchen outlets are on a double breaker (Multiwire Branch Circuit or MWBC - very common USA/Canada for the required two 120V 20A circuits in a kitchen) that will support 4800W - I would question whether your "6000W" worth of appliances was actually drawing 6000W, or merely "nameplate rated" for that much total.
There's often quite a difference between maximum draw and actual draw at a given time.