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Tweakers' Asylum Tweaks for systems, rooms and Do It Yourself (DIY) help. FAQ. |
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Tweakers' Asylum Tweaks for systems, rooms and Do It Yourself (DIY) help. FAQ. |
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In Reply to: Information I can't find on AA about Dedicated AC lines posted by Coffeecupman on January 7, 2008 at 15:14:31:
Well, we have contacted our electrician, and he is happy to run a 60-100A line to a sub panel for us. Things seem to be moving along well.
The transformer from our utility company also is not on a pole - so our electrician can install for us any kind of wire we like from the transformer to the house. We currently have 125A service, I believe he said. We can go to 200, and choose heavy gauge high purity copper wire! Sweet.
Our ground connection is being cleaned/inspected and the wire to it beefed up with a thicker, lower resistance lead.
On the negatives side, local code forbids the breaker boxes to be inside the house. That sucks. I really don’t like them outside in the weather, such that anyone can hop the fence and cut the power to the inside with the flick of a switch. I know this was done in the name of fire safety, but come on, doesn’t personal security figure in somewhere? That should make keeping the panel in good condition that much harder. We will need a very good high grade weatherproof unit, that is comfortable in Texas humidity.
So, these are the hurdles we seem left with:
Can anyone recommend a high copper purity mains wire of the right gauge to conduct 200A service? We would love a brand/model number suggestion. Supplier would be the icing on the cake but we could get by with the first two. Weight is not an issue, because it is a buried cable, not a suspended one. I figure this may allow us to go thicker than if it were to be suspended.
Now we have a few more hurdles to solve that I’d like to try to talk out in this already very helpful thread.
First, our electrician says he doesn’t want to work with 10 gauge wire. He says it’s too hard to get it into the outlets. Now, this guy is a really decent guy, and we want to hire him. What I would like, therefore, are some good suggestions for reasonably priced outlets ($20-$30 range) that have oversized connections to make installation easier for him (I figure these must obviously exist). Eventually we will be upgrading our outlets to audiophile stuff, but for now, we’d just like something well built that will help him accept the task of 10 gauge – a requirement that we are not willing to budge on.
Sub Panel Load Balance
And there is one MAJOR design hurdle that we are still struggling with at the moment. That of sub panel load balance.
The problem seems to be that if we use a sub panel, it will still have to have a balanced load on it. If we use this circuit only for audio/video, this means that equipment is definitely going to have to be on opposite phases to one another in order to balance the load. However, this separation of phase between equipment has been bitterly criticized as a bad idea. It was suggested that we put the video on one leg, and the audio stuff on the other leg, etc. But the thing is, when we are listening, we almost always have the TV off. We’d like the optimum electrical situation to exist when we’re critically listening to audio only.
I had some questions about solving this that I hope some of you can offer thoughts on:
1. Should we run some lighting on the opposite phase of the circuit? Or connect the fridge to it? I know, I know – these are said to be the 800lb gorilla nasties of the breaker panel. But is there a nice, constant, stable load that we could put on one leg that would adequately balance the load of an entire audio system? Lighting obviously we have control over, and we could turn certain ones on in order to balance a load when listening, although I suppose we’d only be pulling one amp per 120W of bulb, and that’s a lot of light. So maybe we’d not achieve much of a load balance, if, as racerguy suggests, many systems pull 3-6A at their peaks. Okay, I can see myself this would not be any good. Who wants to listen with their sunglasses on?
2. Do balanced power sub-stations have the same phase issues? If we installed an Equi=tech sub panel for our sub panel, would we have a load balancing problem? Does balanced power, once split and inverted, have phases? It would seem to me that if peak power in the one line occurs at the same time as the peak negative power in the other line, that all outlets powered by such a breaker would be in phase with one another? That might be an option.
3. I think I remember some people talking about some devices that they have installed on their large appliances that help control the power backlash on the electrical system. Like can one install some sort of a DIY filter box between the outlet and power cord of a refrigerator such that the electrical system is more smoothly loaded, and at the same time still providing the required power demands to the refrigerator/other heavy load device?
4. This just came to me as I was writing it. What if we installed a sub panel, and on one half of it, we put half of the system, and on the other half, we balanced the load, but through an equi=tech balanced power isolation transformer? This way we could have several outlets of balanced power, several of standard power, an equal load across both phases of the sub-panel, and the potential difference between the two phases mitigated by the lesser potential difference of +120V to 0V (the plus and minus 60’s of balanced power canceling out) instead of 240V from the +120V vs -120V. Is this logic sound?
Where this might fall apart might be the monoblocks. The biggest power draw of the system. One could put them on one leg, but then all the other line level devices would never add up to their power consumption. Putting one monoblock on a balanced line with the other on a standard line just sounds weird.
One could put the turntable motor on the opposite leg from the power amps. That would help.
Or we could install all balanced power in the listening room sub panel, and just run standard dedicated 10 gauge Romex from the main panel. This way we could have all those circuits from the main panel on the same phase, balanced with the household loads (here again one would want to look into filter devices for nasty devices)
We could run the monos from main panel dedicated lines in phase with each other, and then run the entire rest of the system (that has safety topology configured effectively for balanced power use) on the balanced power. There will be 120V potential between the systems at peak, but that’s better than the 240V of a regular mismatched phase. Or, if we find the equi=tech transformer not to be transient limiting, we could run the monos balanced, too. If we install this way, we get the choice of what kind of power we will use for each piece of gear and we have a lot of control over the distribution of the load.
The spirit of theoretical discussion in this thread has been REALLY great! I can’t wait to hear your suggestions/comments.
ccm
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Follow Ups
- Update/New questions - Coffeecupman 20:39:36 01/15/08 (0)
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