installing new UPS for my office and needs electrical work...

[hecktic]

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.

Got it. Now exactly how many feet because I have this option as I discussed this with the electrician today.

We actually talked about it after I mentioned the 12 Wire thing from earlier in this thread and the electrician said he would probably use a Wire 8 if the current breaker was just to get an upgrade to accommodate the new dedicated 30amp line for the UPS. BUT... when I mentioned the new physical room across from the one that currently houses the current breaker box then he said he might use a Wire 10 and then after inspecting the ceiling accessibility options he said it might just be better to install a new breaker box or 2nd breaker box in the new room that has the existing ventilation system. Im going to take some pictures of all this and post it soon.

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.

Yeah I think I get the concept here, its just hard to explain it to the electrician as I tried to do so today. And your talking about the wire for both grounding and surge protection within the breaker box right?

He mentioned Cutler but I dont think it was the same thing you were talking about...

So shorter distance from breaker box to the 30amp outlet, I take is the best way to ensure optimal grounding aside from what you already mentioned about no sharp wire bends and separating the ground from the rest and NOT using metallic conduit..... this is something the electrician I believe missed today when he told me about the idea of running the 30amp outlet in the new room to the current breaker box room thus using the ceiling and the metallic conduit with bends etc.

So aside from just reading that part word for word to him, how else can I convince or make him understand why this is important?

Also the idea earlier you mentioned:

The other alternative is a superior UPS located at the breaker box to power a dedicated circuit. Wall receptacles on that one circuit are powered through a service entrance UPS. Done this way when various equipment is widely separated throughout the building. This UPS typically cost more since even battery life expectancy is significantly longer - more than 3 years.

I was thinking about relocating all of our workstation towers into the server room and running maybe a 'KVM' switch or even separate lines for keyboard, mouse, and video out of the server room into area where the workstations are at now. The reason for this is because each workstation at the moment is connected to its own battery backup/mini-UPS and the maintenance of these units is annoying and gets expensive over time.

IF the server room gets a new breaker with 8 to 12 outlets as I was told today then I am going to do this but if the server room just gets the 30amp outlet and no breaker then I will just move the workstation towers into the server room and plug them into the UPS directly instead of the wall outlets because I don't think our usage in terms of Watts will ever come close to 2,700 watts (and I am in the process of measuring usage of all our equipment with a P4400 KILL A WATT by P3 - http://www.p3international.com/produ.../P4400-CE.html )

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.

No I agree... in fact the electrician talked about even installing "grounding rods" that physically are drilled into the ground and provide an additional grounding protection... it sounds good in theory but does this or is this usually something used today or is this something old school from many years ago???

The electrician said he installed these in a box mode around large generators many years ago.

He said we could add these also into the server room to provide added protection to deter any surge spikes that pass through a surge protector..... what do you think?

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.

Yes Im in the process of doing this using my Kill-a-watt and will have precise numbers for you soon. The electrician also wanted this information today ha.

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.

I don't anticipate to go over 2,700 watts but I will get the exact numbers and tell you soon. The server room we have at the moment that is in plans to be used for this purpose is not too cold but just enough I think... but I will run the numbers and post it here soon.

But regardless of the numbers, so I need to call an HVAC specialist or can I just play with the digital thermostat and just leave the server room extra cool when I close the office (which is usually after 5/6ish pm... opens in morning around 8/9am)

Yeah sorry I didnt mention server room before, but think of it more like a data closet just with a enough physical space to act like a server room.... and really our actual server which will be in this room is probably going to be a tower and not a blade server but if the existing cooling can handle the heat then we may choose a blade server but I doubt it.... we already have a payroll servers equipment and its all setup for a tower server. We will have a rack mount cage but it will be just enough in size to accommodate the 3U APC UPS I posted earlier.

If its cost effective (and it may very well be) then we will install a full blown rack mount cage that you would see a hospital data room that includes a blower fan or something of that magnitude on the top or bottom or even sides of the rack mount cage..... the server will be locked at all times and only I and the physician in charge of the office will have access to this room via biometric lock and maybe also a traditional key locking door knob.

Ever since the EMR systems (Electronic-Medical Records System) revolution began our need for a data room/server room has been growing so maybe its a good idea to plan ahead now for the future especially since there are literally thousands of records that will be fed into our new EMR system soon. (Our conversion started just over a year ago but the demand and growth rate is so much that we need more efficient methods from all angles including billing and not just the record-keeping side.

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.

Well we aren't running a data center by any means although you could say it is a mini-me version of one... and I don't consider a server closet/data room a real data center but anything that wont tear open the floor that will add reliability and performance, then sure why not.

I wonder if I should show the electrician a copy of that IEEE paper...

The electrician did ask to see the meter for the building since we didn't have a meter for our individual office suite and I could not find it anywhere outside of the building so he said it might be in a closet room inside the building that will surely have a key entry access to it... ...but I told him our rent for the office space includes electricity and he said then maybe the whole building utilizes one meter instead of multiple meters for each office....my question to you is, what will seeing the meter do if anything? provide useful information to the electrician?

I showed him a special transformer outside used by our neighbors in the other office suite I mentioned to you earlier -the radiologist who has the special imagery x-ray machines that are worth multi-million dollars and the reaction to this the electrician said "there has to be hundreds of thousands of volts coming into the entire building possibly throwing small surges into your office suite since its next to the one with all that x-ray machine equipment"

So we went on to discuss surge protection and grounding methods and I asked him if we just moved our office to a farther one away from this radiologist with this huge transformer outside of the building (since it sits right outside of our office suite...literally right next to the wall outside of our office suite) and he said it wouldn't matter because its probably effecting all the offices in the building. Ill take some pictures of this transformer and Ill post them but what do you make of this?

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.

Yes the electrician said if we decided to go with a brand new breaker for the server room and NOT run just a 30amp line into the room that he would install a 60amp capable breaker with multiple outlets in the room... at first I thought that was a crazy idea since we don't need that much power but then I realized he was talking about for future needs and he did mention future needs but I wasn't really following him at the time he was talking about this....

So my question is, is too much power dangerous for a room that will be locked up most of the day with no one to check up on it physically? I say physically because I will not personally be there to check up on it daily however I plan to install a PoE Surveillance Camera inside the server room with camera control functions to view the entire room OR multiple cameras at different angles. Will this be enough or will we need like an on-call emergency contact to service something in the event of malfunction or possible failure? I mean I know the electrician company claims 24-hour on-call service for emergency but still what can we do to lessen the need to utilize that 24-hour on call service provided by the electrician company.

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.

Yeah I actually realized this today that only data and equipment used to access vital data needs Battery Backup.... but you know the UPS we have I believe actually has non-battery backup enabled output or outlet connections in addition to those for battery backup AND UPS....
in other words we can use some of the outlets on the battery backup for standard needs and then the others for battery backup purposes.... I have to double check this but I think our APC UPS features these functions.

So if that is not the case, then yeah I will leave the printers out and just plug in the data and data communication equipment.