Dedicated AC lines form star grounds. In the PS Audio Music Room we have multiple grounded AC receptacles on dedicated lines. That means that each AC receptacle has its own wires running back to the central breaker box where the main ground is also located. If each piece of gear is plugged into its own dedicated outlet, then you’ve formed a star ground.
According to that article… I guess option #1 is still best.
Yeah… wished I paid enough attention to discuss grounding, so the job can be priced correctly and the with the correct size conduit… sounds like you got a good plan there.
Currently looks like running #12 common ground is going to be it for me, some of the #10 has already pull to the receptables. Either way it’s going to cost me extra money to redo. I’ll try this option first.
I would never plug in, say two monoblock amps, into two separate circuits. Your whole system should not tax a 20 amp circuit so don’t spread your interconnected equipment across them. At a minimum, you could introduce ground loops.
I took my two VTL Deluxe 300 amps to a stereo shop to audition a pair of Magnepan speakers. I wanted to hear how my VTL amps worked with them. The store plugged each into a different circuit in the room. The amps went into oscillation. Cripes!!! Plugging both into the same circuit resulted in stability.
Now to be fair, VTL did not make great stable amps. I know this because of issues I had in Center City Philly when we would have voltage sags (brown outs). But still, this should not have happened in this high-end stereo store. The owner did not know why it happened, but we assumed each circuit had differing loads on them from other equipment plugged into them.
In short, I don’t see the value in plugging in equipment that is interconnected across circuits. I think you are asking for trouble.
I wired both my previous and now my current home with a single dedicated 20amp cuircuit with a quad outlet. ALL of my interconnected equipment is wired to that one quad outlet. Same for my home theater… to another dedicated 20 amp, quad outlet.
Just calculate your draw and you will see it does not add up close to taxing a 20 amp circuit.
So… really you just need one dedicated circuit for your interconnected audio equipment. Other circuits are for auxiliary use such as lights and such.
Yup, agreed. That was my plan. One circuit for 2 ch audio, one for my Home Theater AV gears, one for PC, and miscellaneous.
For me though, I can see potential for ground loop, for example between AV Pre and BHK Pre (HT bypassed). So hoping I won’t run into ground loop issues.
The other thing I would do in this situation, is connect all three circuits in the load center (breaker panel) to the same phase, either all on A-phase or B-phase. This way there wouldn’t be any difference plugging all your equipment say out of one receptacle bank or spreading the equipment connections across multiple receptacles connected to the same phase.
Got to a 100% 2/3 solution. Pretty proud of myself for having thought of this. We combined two circuits into one, and was able to run dedicated star ground with all 10 awg cabling, both on the same phase. So now I have one for dedicated two channel listening and one for every thing else.
There is an easy access if in the future I want to split the combined circuit back into individual ones simply by running another dedicated wires to the junction box. I doubt I will need it though.
An update after some planning with my electrician.
I’ll be doing two 75ft 6 gauge runs to target a Vd of 1% to 2 gang boxes. I’ll be using the PS Audio outlets.
He’s also going to add a second grounding rod bonded to the main ground and new ground circuits, to lower the ground impedance to less than 10 ohms. We may redo the main ground as well to target the 10 ohm goal.
Ran two 10ga 20 amp dedicated lines yesterday. The improvement is SIGNIFICANT!!! If you haven’t done this yet, just do it!!! Costs less than the upgrade price of an AC5 to an AC12.