Power conditioner wire gauge? Serious issue

All power conditioners steal power.

@clearthinker

This isn't entirely correct. A good power conditioner will do nothing of the sort.

Many 'conditioners' are passive devices and so probably do limit current (and so have a voltage drop) but if the conditioner is an actual bona fide conditioner, it will not only clean up the power but it will also insure that the output voltage does not sag and current (up the limit of the conditioner) will not be limited.

There are very few examples of actual power conditioners in high end audio. PS Audio probably makes one of the better ones out there.

There is a company called Elgar that made real power conditioners a long time ago (they got out of that market in the early 1980s). Their conditioners had guaranteed distortion specs and regulated the AC line voltage. They made some that could handle 28 Amps! This means your entire room could have clean power. If you run across an Elgar it will likely need refurbishment- new filter capacitors in its power supplies and so on. They are built for 24/7 service and use a sophisticated system to insure that the AC they produce is clean with no voltage drop.

Buy a Kill-a-watt meter and put your mind at ease. You'll most likely find that you are pulling way less amps than the wire can handle and have a very high MoS.

Several years ago I measured my entire system through one of these and was just under 5 amps full tilt with mono amps and tube preamp, etc.

P3 P4400 Kill A Watt Electricity Usage Monitor (amazon.com)

@atmaspheres30 

Thank you.  I know you have knowledge of these things.

Since the action of conditioning the power must consume some of it, the conditioners of which you speak presumably have power supplies of their own to make good the loss.

You speak of 'no voltage drop'/  Agreed, we don't want voltage drop, the power supply companies give us enough of that (entirely free of charge).  But neither do we want capacity drop that limits the watts the audio amp can draw.

All this can be easily accommodated if the power conditioner manufacturer publishes accurate measurements of the voltage and kW output for given inputs.

@jumia "It's about impedance along the way and no one seems to understand that"

I would add more functions such as removing odd/even mode harmonics, noise, and isolation as well. 

Since the action of conditioning the power must consume some of it, the conditioners of which you speak presumably have power supplies of their own to make good the loss.

@clearthinker

They do.

The PS Audio, if I understand correctly, employs a low distortion oscillator that gets amplified by the power amp inside and then drives a power transformer. To keep the power draw of the device down they are probably using a control transformer for this task.

In the Elgar, there is also a low distortion 60Hz oscillator. It is synchronously locked to the AC line. The AC power goes through an enormous isolation transformer. This transformer has a set of windings for the power supply of the built-in power amp. The main output of the transformer is compared to the oscillator. A difference voltage is thus created and amplified by the power amp. The output of the power amp is applied to a feedback winding on the transformer. In this way the output of the unit is kept low distortion (no harmonics, especially the 5th which is the most problematic). The output voltage of the power amplifier is also used to 'buck' the isolation transformer, providing boost or decrease as needed. In this way its also able to regulate the line voltage without current limiting. Pretty cool!

In both cases the active circuitry draws power of its own. Care is taken to minimize the power draw; regardlesst does not rob voltage from the output in either case.

We used a PSAudio 20Amp unit at AXPONA last year. The hotel line voltage got down to 110V or less at times but our voltage in our room was always at exactly 120V.