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Power distribution in a mid sized bedroom studio.

I was wondering what everyone's thoughts were on power distribution when your studio sits in a bedroom or other room in your house. I suspect most of us have our studios in a spare bedroom, den or other unused room, and sometimes I worry about the amount of power I'm drawing when my studio is fully powered up.

I use power conditioners for most of my equipment and i have 6 outlets in the room I have my studio in. All of them are in use. I try to not have more than one power conditioner plugged in to each outlet (each outlet, not each plug) and of course I do not daisy chain the power conditioners. What I worry about is that I'm probably drawing way more power off of a single circuit in my house than it was designed for.

We're planning on buying a house in the near future and one idea I had was to have an electrician redo the electrical wiring in the studio to make it safer. I'm not an electrician so I don't know too much about this stuff, but I'm also wondering if it is wise to do that and possibly have all the power in that room come from a dedicated circuit so there is less risk of an electrical fire.

I know that DJDIRTY and a few others seem to have fairly large studios, and I'm curious as to how they handle the power distibution setup in their studios.

Does anyone have any experience or thoughts on this?

Eric, there are a couple of things that need to be clarified:
firstly, what power conditioners do you use now? if they are the ones you can buy at large hardware store or cheap ones from even pro audio shops, chances are they are not true power conditions and just have in line capacitors to suppress surges and spikes. if you want get serious about power conditioning you look at pro power conditoners (like furman).
secondly, I doubt you will be exceeding the max wattage draw in your house unless you're running large speaker stacks or power amps. check the combined wattage usage of your kit and then it will be easy to figure out if your drawimg too much.

my advice is that if you are moving to somewhere that you are going to have a dedicated studio, get an electrician to put in a proper clean feed (as opposed to taking a dirty street feed). they will need to put in a proper power power conditioner after the street feed. also avoid putting any equipment that could cause interference into your clean loop (i.e. dimmers for lights etc.)

hope this helps......

Thank you DJ RANN, that's what I was looking for.

I am using Furman power conditioners, but I did not think to add up the total wattage of my kit to see exactly how much power I am drawing from that one room. I'll definitely do that ASAP.

Is there a way I canfind out how much power would be "too much"? Is there something I can check in my breaker box or some other way to know?

Also, what exactly entails putting in a "clean feed"? What's the difference between that and a "dirty street feed"?

you're welcome for the info.

furman are good conditioners so no need to worry about those.

a dirty street feed is an unconditioned power feed from taken from a main steet feed then seperated in to house loops (sockets and light fixtures) for each room. as a broad laymans generalisation, in each room that you have an electrical item (especially things with electromagnets or motors inside) plugged in, it will introduce a certain amount of interference in to your loop. now think about all the items in your house. now think about all the houses on your street.

getting a clean feed to you house entails getting an electrician to establish a feed from the street mains (not piggybacking from a neighbour's feed) then putting an installation grade professional power conditioner at the feed for the studio room. they aint cheap but if it is a dedicated studio, it's worth it.

Awesome, that's exactly what I was looking for. I appreciate your help on this matter.

Standard circuit breakers are 30 amps. It's considered good electrical design to put different outlets or even sockets in the same room on different breakers, although some electricians don't do it. You should check your breakers to make sure they're 30 (they might be 15 or 20, or might even be 60, though that's unlikely), and turn each one off and on to see what's on which circuit.

To find out how much current one of your appliances is going to draw, just divide the input power rating by 120 volts; you might want to use 110, just to give yourself a safety margin. Anyway, power divided by voltage gives you the amps, so just make sure that the total on each circuit doesn't go over 30 or whatever the breakers are.

It doesn't matter how much the room is drawing, just each circuit. If you have 2 outlets on 2 different breakers then you can draw 60 amps - that's about 7.2 kilowatts. I seriously doubt that you're drawing more power than that!

If you do want to get an electrician in to wire things up "proper", then what you'll really want to do is make sure you have a few different outlets on different circuits. That'll give you a lot more freedom as to how much you can hook up.

Additional power conditioning is fine, but keep in mind that most appliances do their own power conditioning. Obviously they're still susceptible to surges and brownouts and the like, but don't worry about minor ripples or sags or what happens under heavy load - they're already regulating that 120 V AC down to 12 V DC or less, which by itself will get rid of most artifacts.

diginut, really don't want to have a go because your advice is always top notch but it is really really dangerous to suggest (even in tone = "proper") anyone not qualified attempt to their own mains wiring.

even 60 amps at 120v will fry you to a crispy shade, but 125amps (standard for most north american breaker box inputs) will cetainly put you in hospital if not in a box if you get it wrong.

Also, even though most equipment do have some form of transformer in them, these components probably represent less than 2% of the parts cost. this combined with the fact that apart from very high end gear they aren't really designed to do conditioning as such, really just regulate the level of power, which is only one element of power conditioning. having said that, if you run a meter over a dc psu the output fluctuates heavily.

my overall advice is that if you are going to have a dedicted studio and you have spent probably a serious amount of hard earned(or s
not in some cases ) on studio equipment, then spend a couple of hundred on making sure it's going to sound it's best. finally DO NOT ATTEMPT MAINS OR ELECTRICAL WIRING IF YOU ARE NOT 110% SURE YOU KNOW WHAT YOU'RE DOING - GET AN ELECTRICIAN!!!! the possiblr consequences are just not worth it.

I feel I need to make a joke here, but electrocution is no laughing matter.

I really doubt unless you got a massive studio you will need more circuits than the room already provides. We are talking synths and effects on maybe one rack? Audio operates at line level which is like 1 volt, and displays maybe 5 volts. Really the only way to know your need is to look at the power requirements of your hardware, add up the wattages, and divide by 110 or 120 (or 230 for you other guys) to get how many amps. I wouldn't push 30 amps on one circuit in a house, and you may not know the wiring could be faulty, rats chewed it etc, and could be trouble running at that power all the time. Most American home bedroom circuits are designed for 15 or 20 amps, and I would try to keep it below that.

Here's and example, the Virus TI desktop is designed to run like, "Maximum continuous power: 30W" pretty low power device there. And the Korg Triton Rack: 28W. Avalon preamp, 150W max. Andromeda A6, 30W. Not bad for analog equipment.

This is good news, it sounds to me like I may be a little over paranoid about the amount of equipment I have in that one room and that my electricity situation is fine. I haven't had a chance to check in on the total wattage that my setup is drawing, but I plan on doing that this week as well as checking out the circuit setup in my house as DigiNut suggested.

DJ RANN, I'm not sure if DigiNut was suggesting that I do my own electrical wiring, but I would never even think of treading into that territory. When I'm ready to buy a new house I'll definitely be consulting a professional electrician on that situation for exactly the reasons you mention.

Camsr, you may be correct that I do not need more circuits that the room provides. I should know for sure once I add everything up, but I suspect you are correct.

Once of the reasons I was thinking about this was not only in terms of what I already have, but also planning on future expansion. Although I have a nice sized studio right now (4 synths, 3 FX processors, monitors, MIDI Int., Audio Int., computers and other miscellaneous support gear), I'm planning on expanding with a fair amount of additional hardware (control surfaces, hardware FX, etc.) so I wanted to make sure I was operating safely.

Considering the good advice I have received so far, I think I should be OK for the forseeable future.

As always, I appreciate everyone's help and advice!

quote:

Originally posted by DJ RANN diginut, really don't want to have a go because your advice is always top notch but it is really really dangerous to suggest (even in tone = "proper") anyone not qualified attempt to their own mains wiring.

I'm pretty sure you read my post wrong - don't worry, you've got no argument from me here, you should always have a qualified electrician do the wiring.

However, you don't need an electrician to check the breaker sizes and flip them on and off. You're not going to get electrocuted doing that.

Cam is right, just because it says 15 or 30 amps doesn't mean you'll get that, but at least it gives you an upper bound. Also, don't just look at the continuous/RMS power on your equipment, look at the peak power. RMS is for when you're trying to figure your electricity costs - if you're dealing with fuses or breakers you need to think about the peak current it'll draw.

A product like this is also a good idea for the home (Not sure of Northern Hemisphere equivalent):

Clipsal

Quality thread lads.

OK, I added up the input power for all of my equipment, and it looks like my studio is drawing about 699 Watts total, including the computers. So, if I did the calculations correctly that means that I'm drawing 6.354545455 amps. (699 W / 110 V).

Here is the breakdown:

Roland JP-8080 Synth - 17 W
Roland JV 1080 Synth - 16 W
Access Virus B Synth - 19 W
Proteus 2000 Synth - 15 W
Emagic Unitor 8 MIDI Interface - 15 W
MOTU 24IO Audio Interface - 20 W
Lexicon MX200 Effects Processor - 18 W
Lexicon MX400 Effects Processor - 18 W
Mackie Big Knob - 25 W
Event Project 6 Monitor - 100 W
Event Project 6 Monitor - 100 W
M-Audio USB Trigger Finger - 0 W (USB Powered)
Roland PC200 MIDI Controller - 1 W
Dell Dimension 8400 - 300 W
Dell 19FP Flat Panel Monitor - 35 W

Studio Total - 699 W

Does that sound right?

Double check the power supply on your computer.. my G5 draws about 9 amps all by itself.

eric, you're welcome for the help. all things considered, I think that for the kit you have, the furmans will be absolutely fine and you bought the right power conditioners.

Your stressing for no reason man, the worst that will happen is that you'll trip a circuit breaker and your hardware will lose power. You won't be electrocuted because in most houses built/wired recently (last 20 years) everything is wired to make sure that nothing can start a fire (with circuit breakers etc). If your house was built more than 20 or 30 years ago, its always a good idea to get an electrician to check all the same. Your gear is protected from surges by the furmans so it will never be damaged except by blackouts anyway, and blackouts only damage computers I believe?

RE clean power: this only makes a difference to outboard analogue gear (especially gear with tubes) but sometimes a little dirt can be good right? You buy analogue for more warmth, and having a slightly fluctuating voltage is part of what gives you that. Voltage makes absolutely no difference to digital equipment.

quote:

Originally posted by kitphillips Your stressing for no reason man, the worst that will happen is that you'll trip a circuit breaker and your hardware will lose power. You won't be electrocuted because in most houses built/wired recently (last 20 years) everything is wired to make sure that nothing can start a fire (with circuit breakers etc). If your house was built more than 20 or 30 years ago, its always a good idea to get an electrician to check all the same. Your gear is protected from surges by the furmans so it will never be damaged except by blackouts anyway, and blackouts only damage computers I believe? RE clean power: this only makes a difference to outboard analogue gear (especially gear with tubes) but sometimes a little dirt can be good right? You buy analogue for more warmth, and having a slightly fluctuating voltage is part of what gives you that. Voltage makes absolutely no difference to digital equipment.

Yeah, I was initially concerned about an electrical fire, but you're right, I don't think I'm in any danger of that, just better safe than sorry you know? My house is only 20 years old so I think it's all good. I'm happy,

quote:

Originally posted by Eric J Studio Total - 699 W

I'm surprised that those synths take so little power but it does sound reasonable. They probably regulate down to 5 V or less and don't actually do any power amplification. So yeah, 700 W sounds fair, and in that case, you definitely do not need to worry about current draw! A baseboard heater uses more than that.

quote:

Originally posted by CReddick Double check the power supply on your computer.. my G5 draws about 9 amps all by itself.

I seriously doubt that it uses 1.1 kW of electricity, even at peak. A typical dual-core G5 power supply is 450 W and it's rare to even find a PSU on the market higher than 650 W (I can see only one for sale that's rated @ 850 and one @ 1000 and I can't imagine what anybody would need them for - the PowerPC 970 is rated at 42 W so even a quad-core would only need 80 W more than a dual-core).

Even server PSUs aren't rated that high, and Ultra320 SCSI with 8 hard drives all @ 15K RPM running at full load 24/7 is going to draw a lot more power than a G5.

quote:

Originally posted by DigiNut I'm surprised that those synths take so little power but it does sound reasonable. They probably regulate down to 5 V or less and don't actually do any power amplification. So yeah, 700 W sounds fair, and in that case, you definitely do not need to worry about current draw! A baseboard heater uses more than that.

Yeah it seemed like most of my synths took a similar amount of input power. All of them have a PSU except the Virus B, but I checked the manuals and in some cases the back of the units. Thats what was listed, so that must be correct. The Event monitors seem to require the most power at 100W each.

I have a Dell PowerEdge 830 server that has a 450W power supply, but Dell must have put that in there to power the 4 SATA drives. It's a server-class machine, so I'm not suprised that the power supply in there is bigger than a workstation-class machine. That thing is definitely the largest power consumer in the room.

Anyway, I appreciate all your help!

Again, keep in mind that a 450 W PSU does not necessarily draw 450 W - that's just the upper limit.

I've got two large SATA drives sitting out here, one is +5V 0.46A / +12V 0.56A and the other is +5V 0.72A / +12V 0.36A. Each is less than 10 W, and the spec for a Raptor is just under 10 W, so four of those would still run you under 40 W, maybe 30 W or so. Not really enough to require a 450 W supply.

The biggest consumers are the CPU (Core Duo is rated at 31 W, Athlon X2 is 35-65 W, PowerPC 970 is 42 W, quad-core Xeon is 50-80 W), and the video card (Radeon X1950 is an obscene 270 W at high load, GeForce 8800 is about 250 W).

So if you get one of those 8-core Mac Pros with two quad-core xeons and two Radeon X1950s, you *might* push 410 W for those two parts and maybe 450 W if you include four hard drives plus a few additional expansion cards and/or USB devices. 500-600 W tops if you've got a bunch of DSP cards or other unusual stuff.

All this talk of needing 800 or 1000 W is just ridiculous. These companies are just pandering to the crowd that thinks bigger is better ("our board is so awesome that your puny little power supply probably can't handle it!"). The average Core Duo or Athlon X2 machine will never use more than 300-350 W.

Yeah I'd have to agree with you on those monster power supplies. I can see maybe needing something like that for some of the larger Dell PowerEdge servers or maybe some Sun SunFire V series, because those usually have 4, 8 or more processors with SCSI backplanes. Even then, those boxes will have redundant power supplies in them, so I do not see the need for a 1000W power supply.

I can only guess that the "bigger is better" methodology is what is driving the massive PSU's.

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