What is Reddit's opinion of Electricity for the Entertainment Electrician & Technician?

From 3.5 billion Reddit comments

I'm pretty inexperienced with power myself, but I'm reading this book and it has been fabulous. Even has questions at the end of each chapter to check your understanding!

This book is written by Richard Cadena, who is the technical editor of Lighting and Sound America. It will answer virtually every question you've asked in your post, and it will also help you stay safe on the job. Worth every penny.

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EDIT: Submit your questions for Richard's r/livesound Q+A here.

The author of this primer article is both a sound engineer and a licensed electrician. He is the moderator of the AC Power and Grounding forum over at ProSoundWeb and I would consider him to be one of the experts on this type of thing. So for questions I'd direct folks that way. There's also a great book by Richard Cadena about electricity for folks like us.

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Unfortunately stupid people tend to have more confidence in their answers than experts. Which is why it's important to do as much legwork as you can on your own. This stuff kills people so "I read it online" is not a good justification when it comes to power. Also local and state regulations vary quite a bit - some places you MUST ground a generator. Other places you must NOT. So it's worth speaking with your local AHJ and a licensed electrician.

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Use a watt meter, crank some pink through your loudspeakers and measure their draw at full load (just tickling the limiters, wear earplugs). In most cases you can expect this to be 1/8 the rated power of the box. But there are exceptions, and we have to account for reactive loads here, so 1 kW and 1 kVA are not the same. Generally assuming a power factor of 0.7 is a close estimate. But again, there are exceptions.

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EDIT: Thanks for the gold, internet stranger.

The best resource for this in my opinion is Richard Cadena's book "Electricity for the Entertainment Electrician and Technician." [Amazon] Worth every penny.

Richard was nice enough to do a Q&A for us - read it here.

Might I suggest this book.

 

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This is well explained in Richard Cadena's book on electricity for event technicians. It's a great investment: https://www.amazon.com/Electricity-Entertainment-Electrician-Technician-Richard/dp/0415714834

Or toward my new favorite book to recommend Electricity for the Entertainment Electrician and Technician

That page is almost lackadaisical in its presentation.

For anyone looking for a more thorough primer on electricity, I generally recommend this text to entertainment technicians.

For a more general understanding of electricity, I usually recommend this text because that's the one I used in college.

I'm not sure what line of work you're in, but from an event work standpoint, and I suppose a film standpoint, more and more manufacturers are moving towards LED-source fixtures. So if you're actually looking to build a distro and are looking towards future use, 120v may be the direction to head it. It's hard, though, to pigeon-hole yourself into 120v or 208v exclusively. You're better off having a variety and having that flexibility. A good reference for understanding these concepts can be found here