Our barn used to be an office building in the 80s and 90s with some 20 employees.  That amount of people and the electronics of that era creates the need for an abundance of electrical service. Thus it is most excellent to already have it in place. Legend has it that our barn housed the first mainframe computer in Vermont. It’s true.

In an earlier post, here, the diagram I drew showed 2 single outlets already in the floor.  When we moved in, seeing those outlets got me thinking early on about how this room would make a great studio.  And now we’re gonna make these runs to the floor the tech power for the equipment.  As you’ll see those outlets come up pretty much dead center in the room. 

The plan is to shift the runs over to the left a couple of feet so we’re clear of inducing any EMI in the audio cabling in both the main desk and sidecar.  At the moment there’s just a single outlet in each position, but we’re going to drop in a quad box at each spot and add a third quad box closer to the windows which will make a great location for future speaker amps.  Each box will have isolated grounds and a new home run to a separate panel with its own dedicated earth ground.  Mighty nice.

The upper half of the room is getting all new runs for lighting.  Maybe I went a little overboard but isn’t it always nice to have the right lighting for the right moment? We installed new boxes in the ceiling in two positions for pendant lights from an unknown origin.  There will be lighting tracks on the backside of the middle 3 beams controlled by a dimmer on the main switch panel.  On each of those 3 rafter ties we’ll be a flush mounted a box with a duplex outlet on one side and a toggle switch on the other.  One outlet with always be on and the other will be controlled by that switch.  I’m excited about this aspect because on the North-most wired rafter tie I’m looking at  mounting a project which will display on a retractable screen above the North window.  I’m totally psyched to have this and not a display smack in the middle of the sound field.