Home Studio Power Management

[Paulie]

The area under my desk is starting to look like the outlet behind Ralphy's tree in "A Christmas Story."

I just counted all of the plugs I have going into the wall behind my desk, there are 20. This includes lighting, speakers, external hard drives, etc.

Is anyone doing anything cool or recommended to clean up the clutter under their studio desks? I tend to shy away from tying things off like a professional cable guy because I tend to change things a little too frequently. I guess the main goal is to clean up the mess and make sure I'm not creating a hazard back there.

Thoughts?

[waveheavy]

Things could get scary. If you have multiple power strips plugged into one power strip, that can be dangerous, because of overloading that single power strip plugged into the wall outlet. You can still have plenty of amps safety left in a circuit with a standard 15-20 amp breaker protection, but trying to run a lot of things through one single point that acts as a bottleneck is how electrical fires start.

I would plugin two power strips into the near outlet and no more. Then run extension cords from other outlets in the room. All the outlets and lights in a room are normally on the same circuit and thus same 15-20 amp breaker.

Formula for finding Amps is: Amps = Watts / Volts

[edmondredd]

facing the same issue here.. subscribing to this thread

[Danny]

Paulie,

Do you have a rack or desk that can mount rack modules?

I strongly recommend Furman power conditioners. https://www.sweetwater.com/store/detail/M8Dx

I have two of them. All of my plugs and wall warts are nice and organized plugged into the Furman, then zip tied.

[Len911]

If you are changing things a little too often then you probably need a patch bay or a switch box. Plastic ties are cheap.

I don't know what you are changing or the locations, but if it's say power, you could always buy extension cords the size you need, and permanently mount and label them, say source A and source B, mount them close together, and then just unplug from one source for the other source. If you have removable power cords, just buy extra power cords and plug them into the different sources, and plug into the equipment, whichever one you need. I'm not sure if they make them for power, but I could use an ethernet switchbox for switching which computer I need for the internet, though one of them I only use rarely.

The thing about a patch bay or a switch box is that you never need to get up from the chair,lol, and squeeze behind and into racks but only once to set them up.

*You could make your own extension cords for the gauge and lengths you needed as far as that goes.

With a little planning, you could hide most of your cabling inside conduit if you didn't want to mess with the ties. I would put a little distance between the power and audio.

[mojobone]

The area under my desk is starting to look like the outlet behind Ralphy's tree in "A Christmas Story."

I just counted all of the plugs I have going into the wall behind my desk, there are 20. This includes lighting, speakers, external hard drives, etc.

Is anyone doing anything cool or recommended to clean up the clutter under their studio desks? I tend to shy away from tying things off like a professional cable guy because I tend to change things a little too frequently. I guess the main goal is to clean up the mess and make sure I'm not creating a hazard back there.

Thoughts?

There's not a lot you can do about power cables and wall warts, (beyond dressing/tying) but you won't be moving stuff around forever; once things are stable and noise free, you'll probably have a station or two for patching/trying new gear or stuff you only use occasionally. I have two UPS systems with battery protection for eight outlets and surge suppression only on a dozen more. That covers the Mac Pro, video monitor, MIDI and audio interfaces, powered audio monitors, all the rack gear and the main keyboard stack. Circuit 2 is mainly the MIDI drums and the lights; the amp wall is Circuit 3. I couldn't tell you how many plugs I'm using; as to outlets, I'm using them all, plus some power strips. There are three different circuits in my room, though, and while I can pass MIDI data from say the drums station to the main computer, I have to remember not to connect unbalanced audio cables between gear plugged into different sides of the room, unless I can lift the ground.

When you get beyond eight simultaneous inputs is when the cable management process really kicks in. I saw it coming, so I bought an interface with a built in matrix mixer (four of 'em, in fact) and I/O on Tascam DB25 connectors so I can easily and cheaply interface with rack and 500-series gear.

[Paulie]

I ended up purchasing two used Furman units and installing them in my desk (I have a desk that has two 4-space racks on the top). The mess is cleaned up and the pop is now gone.

[Len911]

I ended up purchasing two used Furman units and installing them in my desk (I have a desk that has two 4-space racks on the top). The mess is cleaned up and the pop is now gone.

Great! Mission accomplished!