Power Consumption

[larry7995]

I am thinking about having an electrician put in another plug on a new breaker for subs. Has anyone out there run into a situation where their HT equipment overpowers the breaker for the plugs in a room? Mine isn't now and I am ordering one of those kill-a-watt jobbers to see how close to using up my 15 amps that I currently (no pun intended) have available but I am curious if anyone else has dealt with this already?

 

[bandphan]

have you calculaed your load?

 

[larry7995]

no I have a kill-a-watt on order and I will plug it in between the wall and the equipment, crank everything up to a powerful level and see what its showing, its supposed to be delivered on the 29th. I just wondered if anyone else had exceeded 15 amps with their total equipment draw?

 

[bandphan]

To arrive at the amps, divide the watts by the voltage, which is usually 120 volts. I would stay at 25% from the total

 

[larry7995]

right so for instance if you had a 1000 watt sub that would be a max of 8.3 amps. I don't suppose realistically that the draw is anywhere near that much. If I had 4 MFW-15s running pretty hard I think that would probably pull about 8amps 350-120v=2.9amps so I figure each would draw 2amps

 

[bandphan]

my velodyne recommends 10amps, its a 1250w amp, also remember consumption and output are 2 different things. Check your manuals for cunsumpation then do the calculations, im upgrading my house in the fall, adding a dedicated media room, and going to run a seperate service for that room addition, most likley a sixty amp service withvoltage regulation and one hundred fifty amp service for the rest of the home.

 

[rnatalli]

It would take a hell of a sub to drain an entire circuit. But if a large sub and amp were plugged into the same circuit, then you'd probably trip something.

 

[larry7995]

next weekend I will have the kill-a-watt and post some results

 

[AVRat]

All my gear is on the same 15 amp circuit and have yet to pop the breaker even at very loud volume.

 

[croseiv]

When I power my system up, I can see the lights flicker and dim a little. No breakers have been tripped yet.

 

[Exit]

All my equipment is connected to one socket and I haven't had any circuit breaker problems. I haven't really cranked it up though. The subwoofer is 900 W and the receiver is 120 W times 7 channels.

 

[highfihoney]

I used to pop breakers with my gear in stand by mode

I went with seperate 20 amp lines for everything,4 lines feeding the amplifiers & 1 line feeding the asociated gear.

 

[larry7995]

I'd love to hear that macintosh system

I got my kill-a-watt today and all my stuff together pulls around 5 amps with 6 amp peaks if I am really driving hard

 

[trnqk7]

Sounds about right to be honest. I have my stuff plugged into a ups/voltage regulator that has a watt reading (it's not instaneous, so not terribly accurate) and the max it has ever read is about 400W while watching a dvd (so 50" tv, dvd, receiver)...and it was loud enough The sub is plugged into a different outlet though. On the other hand, my lights dim as well when I power the system on, but just for a second.