Electrician Coming Over What to Do?

I'm an Electrician by trade and basically I agree with everything Natalie said.

I sold a couple pricey power conditioners after putting in six dedicated I.G. 20 amp circuits in my home.

If you want to know what else I think on this subject matter do a search on some of my "tech talk" threads.

Be forewarned I only have 20+ years of experience and can't compete with others having infinite knowledge of this subject matter.

Hey Natalie how long have you been an electrician?

I don't know how I missed Sean's post? Perhaps we were typing at the same time? Anyway I agree with a lot of what Sean has to say except for the one paragraph about putting all the audio gear on one phase and re-arranging the panel to suit.

Re-arrange breakers in a panel can create an unbalanced load on the neutral. This is a known cause of electrical fires. Many times circuits are brought out of a panel in pairs utilizing one neutral (i.e. 12/3 romex)

When you start swapping things around in a panel it is easy to accidentally put two circuits that are sharing one neutral on the same phase. A neutral that was once engineered to carry the unbalanced load of two circuits is now carry the full load of the same two circuits (this is pretty basic theory) and can easily exceed it's ampere rating.

Most thorough electricians will run a dedicated neutral with each hot eliminating the need to gang all circuits on one phase or juggle circuits in the panel. I personally always pull two grounds in order to maintain the integrity of the I.G. system too.

Other than that I think Sean makes some good suggestions.

Hey where's Bob and Albert this threads starting to heat up :^)

Hi again, Sean brings up a good point when he said there is a lot of noise being transmitted in the big city areas via the power lines and that some of it is coming through to your system. I happen to live in a small town in the Santa Cruz Mountains where everything is fresh and clean including the power.

I honestly don't believe I can get the noise floor any lower except maybe by stuffing a sock in my kids mouths ;^).

I would however like to purchase one of those sniffers. It might help when trouble shooting friends systems.

Drubin, fear not the isolated ground, it's the best way to go in my opinion. Even if you can only isolate back to your service (meter) it will work wonders. Just make sure your receptacles are I.G. rated.

Sean makes another good point on conduit size. Hindsight tells me I should have run 1" to my two systems. I ran 3/4 and now the conduit is getting pretty full. I'd like to add four more circuits since I've added more stuff into my system. I guess I'll make due with what I have for now.

Everyone seems to have an opinion on wire type and size. If anyone ever asked me to run #10 solid to there gear which was less than 200' from the source I'd tell them to stuff it. Unless they were paying cash of course :^)

Did I mention how long I've been doing this? 20+ years!!!

There seems to be some confusion on isolated ground circuits. I am not implying you should add a second ground rod to obtain an I.G. circuit. Just tie your isolated ground to the ground bar at the meter if possible or to the ground rod itself. Rarly do I add a second ground rod and 99 times out of 100 I bond the two rods together when I do.

I agree Sean but let's not get to carried away. We still need to tie them together at ground level or under the earth. We wouldn't want to go outside the N.E.C. requirments just to make are music sound a little better, Or would we?