Does anyone have a recommendation for the amount of grounding rods length you should have at your home for an audiophile system for no ground loops? I’m getting ready to have to rewire my entire house due to the age. My home is 103 years old and has original knob and tube wiring and I want to plan for the future. I plan to buy a P20 to make sure I have the cleanest electricity possible for my system in the future. But I want to lay it out in a way so that I can have the cleanest Electrical signal in my neighborhood. All of the electricity is on poles in my neighborhood So I would assume that there is some noise that is on my powerline even though I haven’t had it checked. And I also plan to have a whole house generator installed for when we have ice storms or lose power in my area of Oklahoma. Should I plan to have a sub panel for my audio system or just have it have its own dedicated line to power a majority of the components in my system?
I think two about 1.5 meter (5ft) long copper coated rods in series, separated by at least their length should nearly always be sufficient. Connected with 16sqmm (5AWG) grounding copper.
You probably don’t need a separate subpanel. Just run a 6sqmm (9AWG) dedicated line for ALL your audio equipment.
If you want to be utopistic you can search for a dedicated line cable with sparse mesh shielding. Alternatively a line with twisted hot&neutral with ground running parallel. Dunno about how easily this is achieved in practice. The difference it makes may be worthwhile for very high end systems. Or not.
The external feed is another matter - do you have it coming aerially to your wall or is there a buried feed from the nearest utility pole? Gauge bottlenecks are very real here but if it’s aerial feed not owned by you, you can’t of course change it. Or maybe you can.
I’d say when applicable the external feed should have 16sqmm (5 AWG) copper conductors or equivalent resistance aluminium (much cheaper)
You may want to read the Michael Fremer’s adventure with generator/electrical issues thread. It answers your questions albeit with many posts.
More is better. I have a total of six, including the two original.
My feed is aerial at the moment but when I rewire I’m going to feed it into the ground so I don’t have to worry as much when trimming the trees along my fence line to the house. But it will always have a short aerial run to the box for underground wiring from the transformer pole. So if I’m understanding you right the feed I have to my equipment should be twisted with hot and natural and then the ground just run along it parallel.
I watched it. I’ll watch it again and read all the comments. Thanks
There was a rigorous study about this indicating quite notable benefits. Yes, why not do it if you have a means of either getting certified pretwisted line like this (don’t think so unfortunately) or if you can arrange for professionals to twist them for you. Might be a bit difficult to do it yourself with the recommended gauge!
Note that this principle should actually be applied to all mains wiring in the house to be of noteworthy benefit. The number of turns per length is crucial.
If you want a more convenient braid shielded line instead, go for a fairly loose braiding and make sure of the distance between shield and conductors, you don’t want to constrict the EM field too much.
Hire a qualified and experienced (with Audio and home Generation) Electrical Engineer or Technologist. Tell him/her what you want/need, and have a proper site visit done including ground resistance testing. If you go with free internet advice instead, I suspect much can go wrong, including spending money in the wrong places. If you spend some money on a professional design, a great outcome is more likely.