Separate mains feed

KND

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My neighbour has a rather substantial system - probably when new around £50+k worth of gear and was asking me about putting a separate mains feed in for it.

My intial thoughts were to run separate tails from meter to a new dedicated consumer unit, 6mm sq twin and earth radial circuit and some switchless wall sockets.

Anybody have experience with doing this for their hifi setup? Do you know of any good types of consumer unit and mbc / rcd to use?

 

Tony_J

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Very informative !
Almost as informative as your response!

...the point being that doing that kind of mod to your mains wiring is very iffy these days unless you are a registered electrician.

However, if the gear you are using has a properly designed power supply, and you have a properly installed domestic wiring system, farting around with the mains wiring is exactly that - farting around. Don't expect it to make any difference to the sound quality.

 

johnniebaby

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Almost as informative as your response!...the point being that doing that kind of mod to your mains wiring is very iffy these days unless you are a registered electrician.

However, if the gear you are using has a properly designed power supply, and you have a properly installed domestic wiring system, farting around with the mains wiring is exactly that - farting around. Don't expect it to make any difference to the sound quality.
:goodone:

 

KND

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I am extremely competent with electrical work. My electrical qualifications however do not permit me to do domestic work. A qualified domestic electrician however would be installing the CU and signing work off etc etc etc etc.

My question relates only to what other people who have done it have done and if anyone knows of any good CU and breakers that work effectively with audio equipment in line.

 

reddish75

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Very informative !
I know, why don't I (who knows how to do these things but am NOT qualified as an electrician and would not do it in my own house.) tell each and every Muppet who asks how to do and what to use when rewiring their houses for the sake of hifi consequently voiding their insurance, which they will need when their house more than likely burns to the ground, for the sake of them being tight arses and not paying for the job to be done properly!

I don't know what's going on in this section at the moment, I know its the DIY section to the forum, but fuck there's some dangerous questions and advise (such as information on how to wind transformers) being banded around of late.

Now I don't mind giving advise on repairing amplifiers etc, but that is my area of expertise

- - - Updated - - -

My question relates only to what other people who have done it have done and if anyone knows of any good CU and breakers that work effectively with audio equipment in line.
unfortunately Karl the manufacturers of these are more about safety than how your hifi sounds when connected through it.

 

thommy

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It seems a common trend on forums recently to shoot down anyone who even dares to ask a question about the mains supply. Seems a lot of forum members suffer from either 'fear by proxy' of someone else getting hurt, or the delusion that nobody other than them realises that mains voltage is dangerous. Domestic electricians are not automatically going to know about hifi, and hifi aficionados are not automatically going to be qualified electricians. However it's not uncommon to have dedicated supplies fitted for high end audio systems, and the biggest hifi forum on the web is probably as good a place as any to start asking questions about such a setup.

My first step if tackling something such as this would be to check the AC supply for DC offset, fluctuations, noise created by other equipment in the house etc.

It may not need a dedicated supply at all, or an Isotek (currently under £300 on an auction site) might fulfill the job. Having said that, if your neighbour has spent £50k+ on a system he probably wants to continue throwing money at it for 'peace of mind'.

I write this from experience, having considered a dedicated spur for my system, before measuring the supply and finding it already pretty damn clean as the only thing running in my house when I'm sat in front of the hifi is a fridge and a laptop. I also think that the install you suggested, if required at all, would be a good choice to isolate the audio system from noise generated by other electrical gear in the house. It's not going to clean up a dirty mains supply however.

I have yet to see a consumer unit with silver plated contacts, but a visit to your local electro-platers would sort that out if you were handy enough to take the thing apart and reassemble it. I would however not advise doing that as the potential risk (fire & lack of insurance cover) far outweighs any possible gain. There is more to be gained from a mains conditioner of some type, a dedicated ring would only come into it's own if the power requirements of other equipment pushed the total load toward the 30A limit.

 

JPG

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It seems a common trend on forums recently to shoot down anyone who even dares to ask a question about the mains supply.
On this forum, at least, advice about altering electrical services is against the forum rules, end of. You should have read this when you signed up:

You will not post any recommendation to modify any part of an electrical installation or the mains power supply of equipment or anything connected to it, including fuses, plugs and cabling.
http://www.hifiwigwam.com/misc.php?do=vsarules

Seems a lot of forum members suffer from either 'fear by proxy' of someone else getting hurt, or the delusion that nobody other than them realises that mains voltage is dangerous.
Sadly there are so many fucktards out there that the ONLY safe option is to not give any advice beyond 'consult a pro' - otherwise people might go and try it and kill themselves. And it's less forum members that suffer the fear, more the admins - they don't want to be see someone killed as a result of inaccurate information on their sites, and don't want to be sued as a result of that information. The fact that people jump on it on this forum is a result of the nature of the community and how the forum has evolved over the years.

It brings to mind a rather wonderful poem by Hillaire Belloc:

Lord Finchley tried to mend the Electric LightHimself. It struck him dead: And serve him right!

It is the business of the wealthy man

To give employment to the artisan.
 

thommy

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Don't understand what any of that has got to do with the OP asking what work others have done to modify their own mains supply, most likely under the guidance of a competent electrician, so that he may go to another competent electrician with a request for relevant work to be done. It's not even his house he's talking about FFS...

Just to clarify my answers to the original post:

1) You're unlikely to find dedicated audio grade consumer units as the market is too small.

2) Others have done what you are suggesting.

3) Measure the mains first, it might benefit more from a s/h Isotek or AG mains regenerator.

No suggestions there to modify the mains wiring, only the agreement that the addition of another supply from the incoming box (just like the one already present) is common practice.

Maybe the DIY room was not the best place for the OP to ask an otherwise perfectly reasonable question, but it didn't justify being shot down by a bunch of twats with nothing better to do before it even got off the ground. I chimed in because I have some first hand insight to offer and now forum rules are being quoted at me, when they bear no relevance? Shit, been 'wammed again... Think I'll stay in the classified ads section from now on.

 

Audio Al

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I installed my own in my own home and I am not a qualified sparks ( naughty me :D )

Looks like this



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Had the install tested by a sparks with his test unit , Perfect , signed off as all OK

 

thommy

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Holy shit. 44 sockets in one room? Thats a lot of expense to go to just in order not to have to get up and change plugs! I assume you have a parallel system for interconnects...

 

johnniebaby

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I installed my own in my own home and I am not a qualified sparks ( naughty me :D )Looks like this



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Had the install tested by a sparks with his test unit , Perfect , signed off as all OK
Mmm.............dos and breakfast spring to mind :?

 

KND

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Don't understand what any of that has got to do with the OP asking what work others have done to modify their own mains supply, most likely under the guidance of a competent electrician, so that he may go to another competent electrician with a request for relevant work to be done. It's not even his house he's talking about FFS...Just to clarify my answers to the original post:

1) You're unlikely to find dedicated audio grade consumer units as the market is too small.

2) Others have done what you are suggesting.

3) Measure the mains first, it might benefit more from a s/h Isotek or AG mains regenerator.

No suggestions there to modify the mains wiring, only the agreement that the addition of another supply from the incoming box (just like the one already present) is common practice.

Maybe the DIY room was not the best place for the OP to ask an otherwise perfectly reasonable question, but it didn't justify being shot down by a bunch of twats with nothing better to do before it even got off the ground. I chimed in because I have some first hand insight to offer and now forum rules are being quoted at me, when they bear no relevance? Shit, been 'wammed again... Think I'll stay in the classified ads section from now on.
Thanks :)

I thought my question was a perfectly valid one. I was not asking how to do it. Just what solutions other people who HAVE done it have done.

I had heard of silver plated CUs and audio grade fuses etc before but not sure where I had seen them or if they were even any good. Approved etc.

 

Valvebloke

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I had heard of silver plated CUs and audio grade fuses etc before but not sure where I had seen them or if they were even any good ...
They are like Dumbo's feather. They work if you believe in them. That was not meant to be a cynical or a critical comment. They really, really do work if you believe in them. You hear with your brain, which is also the bit of you that does the believing, so not only is this true but there is also a perfectly good and well-tested scientific explanation for it*. I've met people who have found that money spent on their mains wiring has been money very well spent. Personally I don't believe in it though because I know that any good quality electrical installation will have very low point-to-point impedance between any of the outlets in a domestic property. So a separate circuit won't give your hi-fi any significant isolation from, say, your fridge. A relatively simple filter fitted between the wall and the hi-fi or the fridge or both, on the other hand, might well reduce noise on the supply significantly.

VB

*There are people who assert that the widely accepted explanation is not valid and that there must be some process unknown to science and engineering going on. But they provide no hard evidence in support of that theory. Nor have they been able to propose a test which could plausibly prove it.

 

Tony_J

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I had heard of silver plated CUs and audio grade fuses etc before but not sure where I had seen them or if they were even any good. Approved etc.
Silver plated CUs?? Audio grade fuses?!? Pure, unadultarated, silver plated, audio grade foo.

As observed by Valvebloke, properly installed mains wiring will present a very low point to point impedance between any pair of electrical outlets, regardless of whether they are nominally on the same or on different circuits; putting your audio toys on a separate circuit is not going to change that. Besides, as I pointed out earlier, properly designed audio equipment will have power supply circuitry that takes into account the fact that you get crap on mains supplies from noisy devices like fridges, and will filter out those sources of noise before they get to the signal path. Linear PSUs, for example, will typically be stepping the mains voltage down by a factor of 10 or so, and this also steps down the amplitude of any interference by that ratio; high frequencies will also be attenuated by the impedance of the transformer. The smoothing sections of the PSU should make any remaining noise signal (including the 50 Hz from the AC) completely inaudible.

As for Thommy's observation "...if your neighbour has spent £50k+ on a system he probably wants to continue throwing money at it for 'peace of mind'." If I had spent £50K on a bunch of equipment that was incapable of rejecting mains-borne interference, then it would leave me questioning the competence of the manufacturers of that equipment to design an audio path that was worth £50K, or even 50p for that matter, so it would go straight back where it came from.

 

thommy

Wammer
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Mar 7, 2013
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Wazat then ?
It was a joke - in this instance parallel meaning 'of the same type'. You've gone to all that trouble to install 44 mains outlets so that everything can be plugged in to the mains, but you still need to get up and root around the back of stuff to wire up the audio chain!

 

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