Quote Originally Posted by hecktic View Post
SO... the building I think MUST have some higher than average grade earthing protection for the building itself.... at least I would believe so.
Not relevant. Your earth ground must be within feet of the breaker box. And is visually inspected. Every main breaker box (the one adjacent to utility power meters) must have its own earth ground. You have one. Other buildings have their own.

Ground first meets code - only for human safety. And then upgraded for surge protection (that many electricians do not understand). For example, must also be shorter (ie 'less than 10 feet'), routed without sharp wire bends, separate from other non-ground wires, not inside metallic conduit, and all grounds (ie one from the telco installed 'whole house' protector) meet at the same earthing electrode. If not grasping this, then print it and recite it to him word for word.

All homeowners should have something equivalent if transistors are in the building.

Any building can have no earth ground and all electrical devices will work normally. This is actually a problem in older buildings where homeowners do not appreciate why that ground wire was important. Earthing has one purpose in the code: human safety. And other functions not defined by code such as to make a 'whole house' protector effective: transistor safety. Latter is protection from events that occur maybe once every seven years.

How much power does your UPS need? Every human who plugs appliances into a wall should know how to do this. Read a label where its power cord attaches to the box. Watts are listed. Sum up all the watts. That number should be same or less than the watts listed for the UPS. Simple arithmetic.

Then if a human makes a mistake, an emergency backup protection system (a circuit breaker) trips.

You did not mention 'server room' previously. You know how many watts are consumed. That defines the ventilation / air conditioning also required for that room. Numbers that the HVAC guy can quickly calculate once you know total wattage.

2700 watts? Not 27,000 watts.

How serious to be significantly changes these answers. For example, more reliable systems mean a raised computer floor, grounded (bonded) to the only box that provides all power in the room. That in turn connects to the main power box that is earthed and that contains a 'whole house' protector. Cooling blows under the floor to flow up through the racks. In one room that did this, the copy machine was working happy even after 1 million copies.

Everything in the room is powered and safety grounded only to that room's new box. And all wires into the room enter at one location. All wires between boxes route as a group. This is discussed in the second half of an IEEE paper from Montandon and Rubinstein in Nov 1998 entitled "Some Observations on the Protection of Buildings against the Induced Effects of Lightning.

Probably better to do these additional things if convenient.

Important is total wattages for both sufficient electric power and for sufficient ventilation (including overhead lights if relevant). For current demands and for estimated future needs. For example, if installing a distribution box in a dedicated room, some vacant slots should exist for future circuits.

All depends on how much you want to do / want to spend. And (of course) what the electrician and HVAC guy might recommend.

There is a purpose to having equipment that must be secure to be in a secure room, with sufficient ventilation, and a reliable power circuit.

Also many power hungry devices (ie printer) need not be on battery backup circuits. But data storage (and maybe data access - ie Cisco routers) and critical communication equipment (ie alarm systems) should have battery backup.

All depends on how much you need. What your security and access requirements are.