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?

Last edited by Eric J on Apr-23-2007 at 05:15

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.

___________________
My party schedule:
2009-02-21 - DJ Attention @ I'm So Popular
2009-06-18 - DJ Annoying @ People Need To Know Where I'll Be
2012-11-32 - DJ Insufferable ɸ Or At Least the Stalkers I Complain About
2048-06-66 - Spastic & Whocares ¶ Although I'm Actually Flattered
9999-45-81 - Tweaker Gimp ☼ I Probably Won't Even Go To This But I Have To Make Sure I Fill Up All The Available Space Here

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.

Last edited by camsr on Apr-24-2007 at 09:47

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.

___________________
My party schedule:
2009-02-21 - DJ Attention @ I'm So Popular
2009-06-18 - DJ Annoying @ People Need To Know Where I'll Be
2012-11-32 - DJ Insufferable ɸ Or At Least the Stalkers I Complain About
2048-06-66 - Spastic & Whocares ¶ Although I'm Actually Flattered
9999-45-81 - Tweaker Gimp ☼ I Probably Won't Even Go To This But I Have To Make Sure I Fill Up All The Available Space Here

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?