Here's one more "tip" that i overlooked. Agon member "Brick" posted this tip over in another thread about "dedicated AC lines". Kudo's to Brick for pointing out the obvious. It was so obvious, i didn't even mention it in this thread at all. I'm good like that sometimes : )
Before starting on anything else, take your multi-meter and turn it to AC voltage ( 200 volts if manual ). Measure your AC voltage and see what you have. It should be somewhere between 115 volts and 123 or so. Getting up much above that can cause problems with some gear, so it's not a bad thing to check this once in a while. Going below this can also cause problems, but this would be more of a sonic problem than one of potential damage.
For those that don't know how to do this, you simply insert one probe tip into the outlet on the wall and the other probe tip goes into the other slot. It does not matter what slot the red or black goes into as AC works differently than DC. Bare in mind that i'm talking about the "slots" here and not the "hole" for ground.
After measuring the AC voltage, pull the probe tips out of the outlet and adjust the multimeter to measure DC voltage ( also 200 volt range ). Insert the tips into the outlet just like you did before and see what the multimeter reads. Hopefully, it should be phenomenally low i.e. "0" or "0.01" etc... The higher the reading that you get, the more DC that you have on your line. While most gear can tolerate a small amount of DC on the AC line, other gear can buzz, hum or run very hot. As such, this would be one more thing to check if your system starts making noise out of the blue. Keeping track of data like this in your "audio log" might come in handy. Should you need specific dates for reference when trying to resolve a problem like this with your AC provider, you'll have all the information you need at your fingertips. Sean
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Before starting on anything else, take your multi-meter and turn it to AC voltage ( 200 volts if manual ). Measure your AC voltage and see what you have. It should be somewhere between 115 volts and 123 or so. Getting up much above that can cause problems with some gear, so it's not a bad thing to check this once in a while. Going below this can also cause problems, but this would be more of a sonic problem than one of potential damage.
For those that don't know how to do this, you simply insert one probe tip into the outlet on the wall and the other probe tip goes into the other slot. It does not matter what slot the red or black goes into as AC works differently than DC. Bare in mind that i'm talking about the "slots" here and not the "hole" for ground.
After measuring the AC voltage, pull the probe tips out of the outlet and adjust the multimeter to measure DC voltage ( also 200 volt range ). Insert the tips into the outlet just like you did before and see what the multimeter reads. Hopefully, it should be phenomenally low i.e. "0" or "0.01" etc... The higher the reading that you get, the more DC that you have on your line. While most gear can tolerate a small amount of DC on the AC line, other gear can buzz, hum or run very hot. As such, this would be one more thing to check if your system starts making noise out of the blue. Keeping track of data like this in your "audio log" might come in handy. Should you need specific dates for reference when trying to resolve a problem like this with your AC provider, you'll have all the information you need at your fingertips. Sean
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