mains spur again!

quote:

Originally posted by jodl:
do you think the electrician has some usefull leads in stock, or should I buy(where) it and hand it over to him to install it?

I think, that You can trust the electrician. Usually, it is a good practice to use a high quality copper wiring with at least 3x 1,5m^2 thick wires, preferably 3x 2,5mm^2 (it's 3x because one wire is used for grounding terminal, one for phase-live and one for neutral).
I think that in Austria You have simmilar regulations concerning house electrical wiring as we do here in Slovenia, so if the electrician is a registered one, he should not use anything that is not allowed by regulations.

Go for quality copper wiring with 2,5mm^2, that is what I have done, when recently rewiring the whole appartment.
If You have 3 phase wiring coming to Your apartment/house, tell the electrician not to connect the new spur to the phase where also the washing/drying machine is connected. Elecromotors are the biggest source of distortion in a "normal" living environment

Regards,
Bostjan

Hallo Jo,

The point is you may buy some special household cable from Britain (10mm2 Twin & Earth, BASEC approved) as well as circuit breaker(s) from Memera. Both are hardly available in Vienna but can be obtained from the Hungarian Naim dealer in Budapest.

There is an important point neglected by the Britains: phase. Contrary to their use, we Hungarian as well as you in Austria can likely have all three phases outside the door. You choose the best and you are in the audio heaven, you choose the worst and you get into the... Purgatorium. On this topic you may consult the Naim dealer Longtone, Vienna (hifi@longtone.at).

By the way, I’m allways pleased to hear there is someone here from the same K.u.K. Monarchie. If you want to see what we are talking about you are wellcome in Budapest, any time.

Mit freundlichen Grüssen
graphoman

PS. I see Bostjan’s mail came before my one. I don’t want to make him angry but please neglect the parameters he suggested. Even phase quality has nothing to do with your household machinery. The problem is much more complex.

Mfg
graphoman

Look, what we are all waiting for is one of these :-


Then all the arguements & discussion would stop?

Please Note. The above is a JOKE. Please take it as it was intended!!

Well, thanks for all the info I got - the funny and the serious!

I will report back when the electrician was here.

Concerning all the phases befor the door - I hope this doesen`t get too complicated... First of all I would like to have my hifi on a dedicated spur, but it sounds absolute faboulus at the moment, so I think the phase should be o.k. Ìt`s just that this spur is for 2 big rooms with everything in it.

As I stated, I will report back.

Regards,
Jo

PS: to graphoman: For me it`s enough to be in the European Union....how ever, thanks for the nice wellcome in Budapest!

Hi Graphoman,

quote:

Originally posted by graphoman:
PS. I see Bostjan’s mail came before my one. I don’t want to make him angry but please neglect the parameters he suggested.

No ofense taken

quote:

Even phase quality has nothing to do with your household machinery. The problem is much more complex.

You are right, the problem really is more complex as I have indicated. It is just that I did not want to make things more complicated and was offering a simple answer to a simple question.

And Yes the phase quality depends on a lot of parameters, but You are wrong when stating that the phase quality has nothing to do with household machinery.
Electrical motors (built in haridriers, washing machines etc. tend due to their nature of working distort the wavweform on the phase they are connected to. Usually this can be seen using an oscilloscope connected to the line. The waveform should idealy be sinusoidal, but in most cases it is not so. Big motors tend to distort the sinusoidal waveform in such a way, that in worst cases it looks as a suare wave. This means that there is a lot of higher harmonics present on the line, which should be idealy filtered by the capacitors and inductors in power supply units, but as we all know, this is far from reality

Enjoy the music!

Bostjan

Jo,

may I suggest you consult Sinisa or Franz at Longtone before your electrician would do ANYTHING.

Bostjan,

if you think I have not seen oscilloscopes before you’d be wrong, I had been Editor of a Hi-Fi magazine 1979-1992, my co-editor was one of the leading ingenieur at the Hungarian Instititue for Testing Electric Equipment, so in this (only) field I had been better situated than practically any good magazine in the western world. And since we had much less item to test we published much more educational articles. These all were flowing through my hand, I stand in permanent consultation with good experts and as a visitor I was at home in the laboratory as well as in the “deaf room”.

Please think over what I say. Years ago, I had absolutely no dedicated path, everything was coming from the usual mains. This one powered both Hi-Fi and the washing machine. When we (I must add: incidentally!) changed phase, the improvement was enorm. It made a much, much bigger difference than switching any household machine on/off. Of course, it was not me who realized this phenomenon the first.

Don’t you think it’s time to forget about everyday ingenieur wisdom and believe to our ears instead, do you. Learning from the experience of members of our fraternity may be useful, either. That’s what I keep doing, too.

graphoman

Hi,

Graphoman, with my post I was only pointing out that if one is installing a separate spur for his/hers HiFi, and if they have all three phases connected to their junction box (and paying for them to the electrical distribution company), it would be worth the time to connect the new spur to the phase where no potentially harmful (speaking figuratively) appliances are connected.

With Your kind of experiences, I am sure that You know what You are talking about.

And again, i did not want to start another "engineer / audiophile" battle, believe me.
I am an engineer, but also have ears, and it has been numerous times when my enginnereing knowledge was challenged by what my ears were telling me

Regards,
Bostjan