Powering Wall Mount Displays

sonny

What do you folks typically do when powering wall mounted touch panels? As far as I can tell you still need to run DC from the "brick" power supply, but obviously those can't be stuck in the wall. Running from the central equipment area is a pretty good haul from a voltage drop standpoint, use 16/2 I guess.


Thanks...Sonny

chill

Re: Powering Wall Mount Displays

Originally posted by sonny
What do you folks typically do when powering wall mounted touch panels? As far as I can tell you still need to run DC from the "brick" power supply, but obviously those can't be stuck in the wall. Running from the central equipment area is a pretty good haul from a voltage drop standpoint, use 16/2 I guess.

We generally put the power supply in the rack, or some other location that's accessible for service. Power supplies can fail, but wire failure is quite rare :^)

As for the wire gauge, that all depends on the current draw of the equipment, as well as the length of the wire run. Ohm's Law: it's not just a good idea...

DHawthorne

It depends on the job, but generally I will run a piece of 16/2 or even 14/2 from the panel to the nearest mechanical area, and plug the power supply in there. If I have multiple panels and was able to pre-wire, I'll use a big central power supply with a distribution board. Altronix makes a few of these; a 30 AMP supply with individually fused outputs can handle quite a few panels. As a matter of course, on prewires I run 16/4 to play it safe, and have found on longer runs the voltage drop is enough to warrant combining pairs...it also gives you a spare if the wire gets partially damaged during construction and you are unable to run a new one.

Now if you don't have the luxury of getting a new wire to a mechanical area, or something like that, you can drop a properly rated wire down the wall, and cut in a box in below your panel at outlet height so it's not obtrusive, then put a connecter on a plate on it to connect your "brick," which is just plugged into the nearest outlet. Naturally, you can do whatever variation of this is going to look the nicest and still be functional.

I'm not going to be so bold as to actually recommend this, but I have been successful on short runs with actually sending power on a CAT5. I have a customer with a desktop CV12, and we didn't want a big wire harness running to it, and we also needed to be able to disconnect it easily for the housekeeper to be able to move the desk around to clean, etc. I ran all my feeds properly to a floor box, then attached them individually to an RJ-45 jack. I made a special cable with stranded CAT5 with a single plug on one end, then broke out the network, video (didn't need audio) and power in the base of the panel with seperate plugs off the appropriate pairs. It's important to make sure the power isn't on a pair that would be in use for a real network jack, so if someone plugs a computer in to the wrong jack by mistake, nothing blows up. But the voltage drop is huge on such a small gauge, from floor to desk is as far as I would trust it. It does work in my application though, and we have one nice single piece of flexible cable to the panel.

DHawthorne

By the way, all the above applies to A/V panel connections as well. There is no way I would even consider dropping one of the breakout boxes in a wall without enclosing it in its own metal box (which there isn't always space to do and keep it looking nice).

[Deleted User]

Remote Power for wall panels.

This has always been our recomendation for two main reasons.

A centralized power supply is usually easier to manage and makes it much easier to do a hard reboot if necessary.

It also gives you the option of putting the entire system on battery backup.

Using a high current supply and fusing each power feed is something we recommend in multi-panel systems. Use 18 to 12 gauge wire as requried by distance.

flcusat

DHawthorne wrote:

It depends on the job, but generally I will run a piece of 16/2 or even 14/2 from the panel to the nearest mechanical area, and plug the power supply in there. If I have multiple panels and was able to pre-wire, I'll use a big central power supply with a distribution board. Altronix makes a few of these; a 30 AMP supply with individually fused outputs can handle quite a few panels. As a matter of course, on prewires I run 16/4 to play it safe, and have found on longer runs the voltage drop is enough to warrant combining pairs...it also gives you a spare if the wire gets partially damaged during construction and you are unable to run a new one.
.

This is a very good idea Dave. I expended sometime at Altronix's site but I didn't find any PS for 12 Volts/30 Amps. Do you have a particular model number handy for the 30 Amps?I found the 10 Amps rack mountable with fuses, really nice dough

DHawthorne

This is an old thread . We've moved away from the Altronix for larger jobs because of the current limitation, and use a Trip Lite with the Altronix break out board for output fusing.

flcusat

DHawthorne wrote:

This is an old thread . We've moved away from the Altronix for larger jobs because of the current limitation, and use a Trip Lite with the Altronix break out board for output fusing.

Not for me . Thanks for the tip anyways.