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Power management

KingRazor

KingRazor

Jun 4, 2010
6,747
415
37
Beaverton, Oregon USA
#1
Any electricians in the house?

This weekend we rearranged the stage layout at my church and it looks great but one problem is we have the need to power quite a few things and I'm a little concerned about how to do it right. We have like 10 power strips on stage right now.

Anything we should be aware of? Best practices, things to avoid, etc?

One thing I'm looking into is a power sequencer or two so we can have things turned off/on in the proper order. Help eliminate pops and prevent damage to components. Unfortunately it looks like sequencers are a little expensive (isn't that always how it is?)

Thankfully we have a few people on the team that know a little more than I do about this stuff. If it were just me hooking this all up there may have been things lighting on fire...:D
 
#2
Wow that's a lot of power strips. You should avoid daisy chaining power strips as much as possible as that usually only leads to bad things happening (excess noise, tripped breakers or even fire). You should probably do an inventory of what kind of power all the different things are drawing. Things drawing 100+ watts (power amps mostly) should go on power feeds all by themselves. Things drawing 5-25 watts can be grouped (try to keep the total power in the 100-250 watt range) on a strip with the strip on its on power feed. Things in between are a judgement call.

You'll need to determine which outlets are on the same breaker and which ones are on different breakers. All of the outlets on a single breaker together can only handle 1200 to 1500 W tops and you will do well to stay some what below that. Do the best you can to balance the power between all the different breakers feeding the stage. Don't go nuts. Remember safety first, performance second, and how it looks third.

Be careful of where you run your wires as they can be 1) noisy and 2) vulnerable to getting the insulation pinched or cut. Once saw a flash nearly 3 feet tall when a power cable got pinched in an on-stage outlet box. It happened pre-service and no one knew it also tripped a breaker until 10 seconds into the praise bands first song.

Wires running side by side cross talk more than wires that just cross at one point. Bargain extension cords are only a bargain at the store. Once on stage, you'll wish you had sprang for the extra couple of bucks to get a reliable one.

My $0.02 worth ...
 
#3
play4sanity said:
Wow that's a lot of power strips. You should avoid daisy chaining power strips as much as possible as that usually only leads to bad things happening (excess noise, tripped breakers or even fire). You should probably do an inventory of what kind of power all the different things are drawing. Things drawing 100+ watts (power amps mostly) should go on power feeds all by themselves. Things drawing 5-25 watts can be grouped (try to keep the total power in the 100-250 watt range) on a strip with the strip on its on power feed. Things in between are a judgement call.

You'll need to determine which outlets are on the same breaker and which ones are on different breakers. All of the outlets on a single breaker together can only handle 1200 to 1500 W tops and you will do well to stay some what below that. Do the best you can to balance the power between all the different breakers feeding the stage. Don't go nuts. Remember safety first, performance second, and how it looks third.

Be careful of where you run your wires as they can be 1) noisy and 2) vulnerable to getting the insulation pinched or cut. Once saw a flash nearly 3 feet tall when a power cable got pinched in an on-stage outlet box. It happened pre-service and no one knew it also tripped a breaker until 10 seconds into the praise bands first song.

Wires running side by side cross talk more than wires that just cross at one point. Bargain extension cords are only a bargain at the store. Once on stage, you'll wish you had sprang for the extra couple of bucks to get a reliable one.

My $0.02 worth ...
Click to expand...
I hear ya. It sounds like we may want a professional to look at our setup.
 
#4
First thing is to find out how many circuits you are plugged into. Everything you have could be perfectly sound if it is balanced properly across enough circuits. If your stage looks like the Griswald's at Christmas that probably isn't as good.

Extension cords run into power strips as an installation is a fire code violation. We had to make some power strip extension cords to retain our practice space due to some violations a few years back.
 
#5
cheapbasslovin said:
Extension cords run into power strips as an installation is a fire code violation. We had to make some power strip extension cords to retain our practice space due to some violations a few years back.
Click to expand...

So a device plugged into an extension cord plugged into a power strip is bad but a device plugged directly into a power strip that is then plugged into an extension cord which is plugged into a wall is ok?

As in:

Device=>Extension=>Strip=>Wall = bad

but

Device=>Strip=>Extension=>Wall = good?
 
#6
No.
Extension cord run on floor to power strip is a temporary portable solution and allowable.

Extension cord fastened to the wall, run through the wall, under the stage, inside a pipe, or in any other "installed" manner is not allowable. It is not "building wire". It is "portable cord".
 
#7
KingRazor said:
So a device plugged into an extension cord plugged into a power strip is bad but a device plugged directly into a power strip that is then plugged into an extension cord which is plugged into a wall is ok?

As in:

Device=>Extension=>Strip=>Wall = bad

but

Device=>Strip=>Extension=>Wall = good?
Click to expand...

We had to make an extension cord that was the power strip. So instead of having an extension cord plugged into the power strip it was the extension cord and power strip in 1 cable. 25 foot cable that terminated in a plastic box.
 
#8
We have:

10 LED Strips
4 Power Amplifiers
9 Wireless microphone receivers
2 Guitar Combo Amps
2 Keyboards
2 Powered Loudspeakers
1 Powered Subwoofer
2 Digital Snakes
1 Fan

So that's a total of 33 outlets needed to power everything.

We have I think 4 pairs of wall outlets on the stage.

There's a rack on one end of the stage that has one of the snakes a wireless receiver and 3 power amps. On that side there is also 1 loudspeaker and the subwoofer. That's the side of the stage where the drum cage is so there's also a little fan.

The other side of the stage has a rack with 8 wireless receivers, a power amp, two electric guitar amps, two keyboards and a loudspeaker.

Each side of the stage has 5 LED strips.
 
#9

Wow King, that sounds like a first-class mess!

Ordinarily I’d expect there’s a good chance that the four outlets you have on the stage are all on the same circuit. However, you have so much stuff that I’m sure you’d be tripping breakers if that were the case. So the fact that that’s not happening is says a lot – all good.

When you say “four pairs of wall outlets,” do you mean four duplex outlets (each location will accept two power cords), or four “quad-box” locations (each location will accept four power cords).

Regards,
Wayne A. Pflughaupt


Administrator, Tobias Club
Aministrator, Pedulla Club #45
Big Cabs Club #23
Tobias Club

 
#10
WayneP said:

Wow King, that sounds like a first-class mess!

Ordinarily I’d expect there’s a good chance that the four outlets you have on the stage are all on the same circuit. However, you have so much stuff that I’m sure you’d be tripping breakers if that were the case. So the fact that that’s not happening is says a lot – all good.

When you say “four pairs of wall outlets,” do you mean four duplex outlets (each location will accept two power cords), or four “quad-box” locations (each location will accept four power cords).

Regards,
Wayne A. Pflughaupt


Administrator, Tobias Club
Aministrator, Pedulla Club #45
Big Cabs Club #23
Tobias Club
Click to expand...

Four duplex outlets.

This stage was definitely not built for so many electric instruments. There haven't been any broken circuits yet. I'm pretty confident that it's safe right now, but it's far from ideal.
 
#11

KingRazor said:
Four duplex outlets.
Click to expand...
Ouch. That makes things tough.

You might look into getting an electrician to come in and expand those to quads. It’s not that hard to do, if there’s someone in the church who knows about electricity, they could do it.

Alternately it wouldn’t be hard for someone who’s reasonably handy to build “extension quad boxes” that you could plug into those outlets – sort of a home-made, high-quality (and high capacity) power strip. This doesn’t even require an electrician. It could basically be anyone who knows how use a screw driver and knows at least something about wiring. It would look similar to this, only with a metal box. Each one could be made for under $20 in materials; I could supply a parts list and instructions if you like.

One such device per outlet would net you three extra plugs per location. You might want to consider that, because you really shouldn’t be plugging power amps into plug strips. It’s probably okay if they’re no more than 150 watts or so, and if the plug strip has a decent build quality. But more than that they really should be going straight to a wall plug (or one of the above-mentioned extension quad boxes), or perhaps a rack-mounted distro like the Furman PL-Plus or ETA S15. Even with those, I wouldn’t plug more than one or two amps into one of them.

Speaking of rack-mounted distros, all of your equipment racks should have one anyway. They would take care of lots of piddlin’ stuff like those wireless receivers.

If you must use power strips (and it sounds like you mjust), at least use good ones like the Furman SS-6B . Notice that it uses real electrical plugs. Those cheesy plastic plug strips - if you took one apart and saw how cheaply they’re built it would scare you. Absolutely no amplification equipment should be plugged into those things!!!

Regards,
Wayne A. Pflughaupt


Administrator, Tobias Club
Aministrator, Pedulla Club #45
Big Cabs Club #23
Tobias Club

 
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#12
Yeah I know a guy in the church that can probably put in some quads.

3 of our power amps are running off of a Juice Goose Power Conditioner right now and I plan on getting another conditioner for our other rack (for mic receivers and the 4th power amp).

My local Frys carries these big long metal power strips that appear to have real electrical plugs, might look into getting some of those, they look pretty heavy duty.

I think regular strips are fine for the LEDs, I don't believe they have a very heavy draw.
 
#14
KingRazor said:
Just curious, how do the big production places manage their power? Like, say we had a dozen power amps in a rack in a back room...what would we do then?
Click to expand...

Probably have a dedicated circuit panel for the power amps, split off the incoming mains lines with 0 gauge (or bigger) copper.
Each pair of amps (or possibly each amp, if they're really big, high-power amps) would probably get it's own 30 amp breaker. The stage service would be completely separated from the amp power, probably on a few different breakers of it's own as well.

Those are the kinds of things you have to think about before you start building... that, or spend a lot of money bringing a subpar electrical system up to spec.
Although, with modern power amp technology the way it is, stout wall power has become less critical. It's still important, mind you, but you can get away with things now that wouldn't have worked 20 years ago.
 
#15

I used to work as an installer for a pro-audio company. Part of the specifications for a large installation was having dedicated electrical service put in for all the equipment. It was up to the customer to take care of that, as far hiring an electrical contractor to do the work. The work would be done to our specifications - the number of circuits and their capacity (based on the amount of equipment being installed and other factors), and typically isolated ground service.

We typically installed in all the electrical outlets inside our equipment racks, often several quad-boxes spaced top to-bottom, all connected by conduit and wired in a star-grounding scheme with commercial THHN. The electrical service at the site would be dropped into the rack either from the ceiling or up from below the floor, and hardwired into the rack.

You can see an example in the bottom right hand picture Tobias Club. Note that the equipment plugged into outlets at the left side of the rack, and large metal flex tubing at the top of the rack, bringing in the electrical service.

Regards,
Wayne A. Pflughaupt



Administrator, Pedulla Club #45
Aministrator, Big Cabs Club #23
Tobias Club
Pedulla Club #45

 

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