241. Richard Cadena, “Electricity for the Entertainment Electrician & Technician”

In a “shocking” Episode 241, Sean and Andy talk with Richard Cadena, author of the book “Electricity for the Entertainment Electrician & Technician” as well as serving as a freelance lighting designer, lighting consultant, and trainer. He’s worked on concert tours, television, and theatre, and has designed dozens of lighting systems for permanent installations. Richard is also the technical editor for PLASA Media and a columnist for Lighting & Sound America, Lighting & Sound International, and Protocol, and is a member in good standing of IATSE Local 205. This episode is sponsored by Allen & Heath and RCF.

Topics covered include power distribution and safety, ESTA’s Entertainment Technician Certification Program (ETCP) Certified Entertainment Electrician and Portable Power Distribution Certifications, why most rental shop quad boxes are dangerous, what types of multimeters to buy for maximum utility and safety, and much more! Richard would like to thank Overdrive Energy Solutions and Neel Vasavada, Boxer Hardison, and Sean Jacobs, who brought him in on the battery/inverter gigs he talks about in the episode.

Episode Links
“Electricity for the Entertainment Electrician & Technician” (Richard’s book)
Richard’s Online & In-Person Training
Richard On Substack
Overdrive Energy Solutions
The Case of the Deadly Arc Flash (article)
Fluke 323 True RMS Clamp Meter
Ideal TightSight Clamp Meters & SureTest Circuit Analyzer
Episode 241 Transcript

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Transcript

Episode 241: Richard Cadena

Note: This is an automatically generated transcript, so there might be mistakes--if you have any notes or feedback on it, please send them to us at signal2noise@prosoundweb.com so we can improve the transcripts for those who use them!

Voiceover: You’re listening to Signal to Noise, part of the ProSoundWeb podcast network, proudly brought to you this week by the following sponsors:

Allen & Heath, introducing their new CQ series, a trio of compact digital mixers for musicians, bands, audio engineers, home producers, small venues, and installers that puts ease of use and speed of setup at the heart of the user experience.

RCF, who has just unveiled their new TT+ Audio brand, including the high performance GTX series line arrays and the GTS29 subwoofer. Be sure to check it out at rcf-usa.com. That's rcf-usa.com.

Music: “Break Free” by Mike Green

Andy Leviss: Hey everybody. Welcome to another episode of Signal to Noise. I'm your host, Andy Levis with me as always is my two dogs downstairs and my co host, Sean Walker. What's up, Sean? 

Sean Walker: Sup dude? Sup y'all? How you guys doing? 

Andy Leviss: I'm doing alright, you know, it's been a busy week and a half, you know, we talked last time about fashion week and have been finishing that up, so it's just been fashion shows and all sorts of weird places, doing lots of com things and, you know, now having a little bit of down time to catch up. How about you? 

Sean Walker: That's awesome dude. That's a way more interesting than me. I'm elbows and eyeballs deep in ERP systems and CRM systems and inventory systems. And I'm pretty much just want to blow my brains out at this point of tech stack nonsense horseshit. 

Andy Leviss: That was a whole lot of TLAs at once... 

Sean Walker: God! Dude, just, just, I thought I was gonna be able to mix rock shows and here I gotta, like, command a spaceship. 

It's frickin bananas, bro. 

Andy Leviss: So, you don't know what TLAs are? 

Sean Walker: What? 

Andy Leviss: Do you know what TLAs are? Three letter acronyms. 

Sean Walker: Oh, okay, yeah, alright. Totally. 

Andy Leviss: So y'all have been hearing laughing in the background there. Our guest this week is Richard Cadena. Rich is, he literally wrote the book on entertainment and electricity, which, what's the official title is? What, Electricity for Entertainment Electricians and Technicians? 

Richard Cadena: It's way too long, yeah, Electricity for Entertainment, Electricians and Technicians, and I specifically added and technicians because in Canada you're not allowed to call yourself an electrician unless you have a commercial license. 

Andy Leviss: Fair enough. That's, I do, like, we get into that argument here, here in the States, of course, but it's, it's, yeah, it's not quite as legally prohibited. But, uh, yeah, we, you know, power is one of those subjects that comes up every day in what we do, and, you know, like, I've known, I've known Rich a long time. Rich taught the course that I did as a refresher right before I got my ETCP. 

Entertainment Electrician Certification, which we'll probably touch on a little later, uh, longer ago than I'd like to admit. So, you know, he's, he's been on my short list of folks to get on and introduce to Sean and the rest of y'all for a while, because I know we always have questions and this is one of the guys who knows the answers on that subject. 

So, uh, 

Richard Cadena: thanks for bringing me on, 

Andy Leviss: yeah, I, I was shocked 

Richard Cadena: honored to be here. 

Andy Leviss: Yeah, we're quite amped up for this episode. 

Richard Cadena: yeah, that's a little bit revolting. 

Andy Leviss: Woohoohoohoohoo. Alright, he'll fit in, he'll, you'll fit in fine. so, why don't, before, before we start with questions, and we've got a bunch that like some friends and listeners sent in, but why don't you give us a little, a little about you, what you do, how you got into, into that and, and all that. 

Richard Cadena: well, I got in, uh, kind of by accident. I was, I was, I was a musician and I wanted to be a roadie. And there was a, at the time there was a company in Austin, Texas called Black Star Productions. They did all the concerts. You'd go to a show and you'd see their banners up. And so, you know, when I got tired of starving, uh, trying to make music, you know, play music, I called, I looked them up and I called, well, I couldn't find Black Star. 

Because they, I didn't know they had already gone out of business, but there was another company called Blackstone Audiovisual and I thought, okay, well maybe I just got it wrong. So I called them up and I go, hey man, do you guys need a tech? And they go, yeah, yeah, come on down and apply. So I went down there and, uh, got the job, uh, well, I'm giving you the short version because I actually, I got the job, but I. 

Uh, I told them I didn't want to work full time because I was a musician and they went, Oh, no, no, no, no, we have too many musicians. No, you can't have the job. So I said, okay, well, I'll be back a year later. I'll be back next year when the band winds down. So, and I was, I came back 366 days later and the guy remembered my name and hired me on the spot, Richard Bellevue. 

He's got an incredible. Memory, but, um, so I, and I worked for them for probably three days before I realized it was the wrong company, but it wasn't, it wasn't Blackstar, it was Blackstone, but we were installing sound lighting and video systems in nightclubs all over the country. And, and then a year later, they changed their name to High End Systems. 

And that's how I got in the lighting business instead of the audio business, because I always wanted to be an audio engineer. Yeah, they're still around. They got bought by ETC. They're doing pretty well.  

Andy Leviss: And then from there you, you've kind of like, you've had a Like, what bulk of your career is teaching? Because you do a lot of teaching. Is that exclusively what you do at this point, or is that just a part of it? 

Richard Cadena: It's a part of it. Now, uh, you know, I, I worked for high end for 13 years and then I left and, and, uh, went, did a couple of things, but ultimately I started freelancing. And from my experience there, I wrote a book called Automated Lighting, The Art and Science of Moving Light. And, um, This is right around the time they started the ETCP certification program and they needed people to teach prep courses. 

So Jim Utterback from Local 22 in DC called me up and he said, hey, you want to come to DC and teach a three day class? And I was like, yeah, sure. So I went. And people came from New York and from Miami and from Philly and DC and we had this huge class and that class led to another class which led to another and it just kind of snowballed. 

I never intended to, I never set out to teach, you know, uh, workshops or or anything. Uh, but the demand is there and it kept increasing but I still work shows because I want to kid, um, stay current and relevant and keep up with the technology. Technology moves fast and Practices, techniques change. So I still love unloading the trucks. 

I still, you know, I love the smell of a truck unloading in the morning. So yeah, I 

Sean Walker: the one guy, huh? The one guy that likes 

Richard Cadena: I'm the one. I'm the one. Yeah. 

Sean Walker: That's 

Andy Leviss: That's got to be like, 

Sean Walker: of trucks to unload. Come 

Andy Leviss: got to be like a self feeding thing, like inhaling that exhaust just makes you a little crazier, which makes you want it more. 

Richard Cadena: that's right. 

Andy Leviss: This explains a lot about you, 

Richard Cadena: yeah, exactly. You get me, man. You get me. 

Andy Leviss: Um, yeah, and I mean, that's, I mean, that's what I, like I said, I took your class, like, it kind of be like more than 10 years because it's a five year renewal on ETCP, right? 

Richard Cadena: Right, yeah, 

Andy Leviss: So yeah, so it's, it's got to be about like 12 years or so, because I've renewed twice since then. And yeah, it was, it was Like for anybody who's considering that and again, we'll revisit that to explain what it is for the folks who don't it's like It's great to be able to get that refresher Both for the little bits of things you forget and also just the oh, I actually do know this It's it's like that that little bit of confidence boost going, you know Going into that certification exam because it's it can be a scary thing Um, I mean, maybe, I guess while we're on that subject, why don't we shoot, let's explain to folks what ET CPA is and kind of get that out of the way, because I know in the theater world, lots of people know about it, and I don't know that as many folks in the concert world, which is where a lot of our listeners are, do 

Richard Cadena: Yeah, so the Entertainment Services Technology Association, ESTA, started a certification around 2006, I believe it was. And it's primarily because, you know, there's been some accidents and You know, the insurance companies start asking questions. Who's qualified to do this? And so they started, uh, well, they put together a, um, subject matter experts to write an exam for rigging and for, uh, electrical. 

So in, in the beginning, there was arena rigging and theater rigging, and then there was entertainment electrician, which is, which covers power distribution and lighting control systems. And then they. tacked on portable power distribution technician certification probably about, I don't know, seven years ago ish. 

And so today there's four different certifications. And basically, you know, you take an exam and if you If you become certified and people say, well, what does that get you? Well, you know, it depends where you are, but there are some positions that require certification to take in order for you to be hired. 

And then there, there's also, sometimes there's a bump in pay. I know in my local, at, um, IATSE local 205 in Austin, some, uh, some of the, uh, calls are for certified electricians and riggers, in which case you get a hourly bump in pay. 

Andy Leviss: So I'm, I know that that power distribution, uh, certification came up. Is that, is that a, it's a subset of the full CEE, or is it an entirely separate, like at least in terms of subject. 

Richard Cadena: the way that came up was, uh, at the time it was, uh, was, uh, PSAV, uh, had a lot of technicians who were setting up lighting gear and audio and video gear, but they very seldom set up a big control system. You know, it's a very simple control system. So 

Sean Walker: You don't 

Richard Cadena: the, uh, Right. And so the company thought, well, why do they have to take an exam that covers controls when our controls are very simple? 

So, so they went and asked for another certification. And so basically the Portable Power Distribution Technician Certification is kind of a subset of Entertainment Electrician. It covers mostly the same topics, except for Lighting controls. So, both of them cover, you know, um, power calculations and grounding and bonding and, you know, all these things that matter when you're distributing power on a stage. 

Andy Leviss: Copy. So basically, as a sound engineer, if that had existed when I took the CE, I probably would have been well suited and would have just taken that one instead. 

Richard Cadena: Right, yeah, if you're a sound engineer and you never touch a lighting console, then why do you need to take the Entertainment Electrician certification when you can take the Portable Power Distribution Technician certification? 

Andy Leviss: Gotcha. I mean, yeah, now that I have it, I'm going to keep renewing the one I got. But, but yeah, for folks there, that certainly, yeah, it makes it a little easier, a little less studying of things that, that you don't deal with anywhere outside of it. That's, that's a cool thing. 

Richard Cadena: absolutely. 

Andy Leviss: cool, but then the training that you do, obviously, I feel like we should clarify is not just targeted towards folks taking the test, that is one of the things you do is kind of that refresher brush up, but you teach classes for kind of all levels of 

Richard Cadena: Yeah, 

Andy Leviss: right? 

Richard Cadena: absolutely. Yeah, from top to bottom, you know, especially since the pandemic, there's been a flight of talent from our industry. And so, I thought it'd be a good idea to teach, to cover some real foundational stuff. So, you know, I'm doing an L1, L2. Uh, tech class in Atlanta at the end of March. And, uh, I've got some other things on the horizon as well, but, you know, there's just such a demand for, um, the technology is not getting easier, any easier to understand or to put together. 

And then you have a whole bunch of new people coming into the industry, so the time is right for You know, some, just all kinds of training, 

Andy Leviss: Awesome. And yeah, that's, I mean, that's, I know, I've certainly seen that since the pandemic come back. There's, yeah, new people coming in, old people going out. And I think also just like the, the downtime we all had to learn for a certain segment of the industry pleasantly made it so that we realized like, oh, we do have a lot of things to learn and we don't know it all. 

And that's like, I feel like it opened up people to absorbing more education that, that when we were slammed before the pandemic, people were less open to. 

Sean Walker: you guys know texts that don't think they know it all? 

Andy Leviss: I've met a few lately, it's been a pleasant surprise. 

Sean Walker: a pleasant surprise. 

Richard Cadena: you say that but but what's what I think is really interesting is that I have very often very experienced people coming in to to the class, and sometimes they're forced to take it, or sometimes they're encouraged to take it, but you can tell they're not really, uh, there of their own volition, but then they end up leaving, and they go, wow, I didn't know what I didn't know, and, you know, it's kind of illuminating for them, no pun intended, but, you know, when somebody shows you the stuff, you're like, oh, wow, I didn't know that I didn't know that, right? 

Sean Walker: Yeah, totally. That's the story of my life. 

Andy Leviss: All of us. Yep. Um, so on that subject, uh, as you've been teaching these classes now, you know, a decade and going, um, what are some of the, what are some of those most common things that come up that people are like, Oh, wow, I had no idea about that. Like, do you notice patterns of 

Richard Cadena: yeah. So, well, you know, surprisingly enough, um, there are a lot of very experienced, very intelligent people who don't really know how to do power calculations because there's a confusion about when to use the single phase power formula versus the three phase power formula. And, you know, I'm going to lose some of the audience here because, uh, you know, um, the, who was the, uh, the author that once said that His publisher told him that for every equation he puts in the book, he cuts the audience in half, you know, so I'll try not to, I'll try not to mention the M word math, but, but, you know, the only difference between those two really is, well, there's a lot of differences, but one has a square root of three, one doesn't, but you use the three phase formula on the three phase circuits, you know, the feeder, and then use a single phase formula on the branch circuits. 

But people sometimes get that confused, and so very often, you know, power calculations can be a bit challenging. Um, the other thing that people, um, well, there's actually several topics, but the main ones are, um, power calculations, um, also, uh, uh, power factor is sometimes hard for people to grasp. And then also grounding and bonding, you know, um, as people have been mentioning, there are Grounding and bonding is very often misunderstood, and I think part of the reason is the terminology we use. 

You know, when you have a power cable, when you plug in your audio amplifier, and if you were to peel the jacket off that cable, you know, there's three wires in there. You have a black wire, a white wire, and a green wire. And the green wire we call a ground, but it has nothing to do with the earth. It's really a bonding conductor and its sole purpose is to make sure that if there's a short circuit to the chassis that it trips the circuit breaker and removes that stray voltage. 

But we, because we call it a ground, people think that it has something to do with Electricity flowing through the earth, which it does not, you know, so, um, and once you draw pictures and show people, it's not hard to understand. It's just that people often, you know, very often in our industry, people are trained by somebody who's trained by somebody who's trained by somebody, they got on the job training. 

It's, it's not very often that people go and, um, you know, study electricity or power distribution or electronics formally and then come into the industry. You know, I once taught a class in, in Boston where one of the people in the class said, Everything I know about electricity, I learned in art school. 

And I'm like, yeah, that sounds about right for a lot of us, you know. So, um, it, it's not that, 

Sean Walker: the smattering of your orange extension cords all over the stage. That tracks. 

Richard Cadena: right? Right? Yeah. Yeah, so, um, you know, there, we have a lot of really Bright, gifted, intelligent people in the industry, but, but, but, you know, there are people who are experienced and experience doesn't teach, always teach you the right lessons. Sometimes experience teaches you the wrong lessons. You know, uh, how many times have you, uh, encountered somebody lifting the ground and, at the end of the night, you know, everything worked. 

Nobody got hurt. So they figure, Oh, I don't need that green wire. That's superfluous, you know, but that's not true. It's, it's there for a very important reason. It's there. It actually saves people's lives, you know? So, experience doesn't always teach you the right lessons. The combination of training. And experience can't be beat. 

That's really what we need more of. 

Sean Walker: Dude, that's awesome. 

Andy Leviss: Yeah. Uh, and I mean, you already mentioned two topics that I think for the, for the sake of listeners, you know, coming along with us who aren't as familiar, we, we should probably dive into both of those. I know one question we got in advance was a little bit of a like kind of single phase versus three phase for dummies. 

Like, do you think you could give a little crash course for folks on that? 

Richard Cadena: Sure. Yeah. You know, and uh, if you think about where three phase or polyphase power originated, you know who invented polyphase power? Any idea? Take a wild, wild ass 

Andy Leviss: I was going to, I mean, it's going to be either Edison or Edison or Tesla. 

Richard Cadena: Tesla, yeah, Nikola Tesla. Well, Andy's mom maybe figured it out later on, but, but first it was Tesla. And, and, 

Andy Leviss: Sorry, 

Richard Cadena: dude, okay, uh, where were we? So, yeah, so, thank 

Sean Walker: and not the 

Richard Cadena: so Tesla, you're right, Nikola invented it for, for one, one main reason, and that is because at the time, We, um, you know, we had lights and we had motors. You could run a light with AC or DC, but you could only run a motor with DC. Power and you need brushes for that and brushes are very inefficient and Tesla recognized that so he conceived of the idea of Polyphase power, you know, so if you think of single phase at you know, the voltage is a sine wave, right? 

So the voltage rises and falls and goes negative and goes positive rises and falls rises and falls Well that tracks with the torque of the motor So when the voltage drops to zero, the motor stalls. That doesn't work very well. So Tesla got the idea, well why don't we have two sine waves and if they're out of phase with each other, then when one of them is at peak torque, the other is at zero and vice versa. 

So the motor never stalls. The motor keeps going around and around and around. Well that's two phase power, which by the way, You know, there was some two phase power installed years and years ago, and there's still some, if you, if you Google it, you'll find there's two buildings in Philadelphia, and I think one other one somewhere on the East Coast, that still have two phase power. 

And that is, they're out of phase by 90 degrees. Now, um, people later on figured, well, hey, if two phases is good, how about three phase? So they tried three phase, and they found it's more efficient, 

Sean Walker: Merica, more is better. 

Richard Cadena: more is better. Right. So. So, three phase power is, you can think of it as three independent circuits, or three independent sine waves, but they're out of phase with each other. 

But instead of being out of phase by 90 degrees, they're out of phase by 120 degrees. So if you draw a circle, it's 360 degrees, you go around one third, and then another third, that's where the three phases are. So the whole idea being that you have three. Independent circuits, but two of the circuits actually share a conductor and they can do that because they're out of phase with each other. 

You know, um, you people being audio people, you understand that if you take, um, two sine waves and they're out of phase with each other by 180 degrees, what happens? If you add, if you sum them and they're completely out of phase with each other, what kind of sound do you get out of it? 

Sean Walker: They cancel, you get none. 

Richard Cadena: They cancel. You get nothing, right? 

Now, if you back off on the phase angle, so instead of 180 degrees out of phase, it's 120 degrees out of Now what happens? You get, 

Andy Leviss: sorts of weird shit. 

Richard Cadena: Magic. No, you get partial phase cancellation. 

Sean Walker: You get crappy sounding drums, that's what you 

Richard Cadena: There you go, right, exactly, because of the partial phase cancellation. So, because of the partial phase cancellation, what that means is, that conductor is conducting less current, even though it's Can it, it's, um, it has the same amount of energy, so it's more efficient to have three phase power than single phase power. 

Now, somebody then said, well, why don't we have four phase power, or five phase phase power, or six phase power? And they did, they tried that. You know, but here's the thing is that, you know, for four phase power, now instead of three hot conductors, you need four. That's more copper, costs more, especially if you're going miles and miles and miles. 

And, you know, same thing with five phase and six phase. But, but there are, there were some, uh, six phase systems out there. Um, are you guys familiar with Chipmunk? Chipmunk was, uh, a lighting designer way back in the 70s. He was Uh, no. Close though. Different Chip Monk. This was, uh, his last name is Monk, first name, uh, I think it's Edward, but he goes by Chip. 

Yeah, first name Chip. And so, uh, he was the Rolling Stones lighting designer in 1970 when they did the SGP tour. And I think that might have been the first worldwide. Concert tour. And he told me that when they went to Paris, they found six phase power in there. You know, so what do you do? Well, you, yeah, yeah, exactly. 

You know, you, you connect to every other phase. So they had three phase power, but they only used, they had six phase power, but they only used three phases, you know. So the whole world is settled on three phase power because it's more efficient. So, that's 99 times out of 100 when you go to a modern day venue, that's what you're going to encounter. 

Does that make sense? 

Sean Walker: Totally. 

Andy Leviss: Yep. And then, and then I think most everybody at this point is familiar with like the voltage differences across two hots versus one hot to neutral, but like, should we, should we, yeah, give the quick and 

Richard Cadena: yeah, hopefully so, yeah, so, yeah, so when you go into a venue and you see a switch and it's going to have 5 Camlock connectors on it, so there's green, white, black, red and blue. The black, red and blue are your three hots, so if you have a 120 volt distro and you roll it in and you connect it with feeder cable. 

From the distro to the switch, then, you know, your 120 volt connectors, which are likely to be Edison, or, you know, sometimes, um, now they might be PowerCon or TrueOne, but when you connect your load, it connects from the black to white, the first one, you know, Circuit 1 will connect from black to white, Circuit 2 will connect from red to white, Circuit 3 blue to white, and then it starts over again, black, white, Red, white, blue, white. 

And it does that so it connects it in a balanced configuration. But that's what we call phase to neutral connection. And that will apply 120 volts to the load. Now, if you have a 208 volt distro and you roll it in and you connect it to the switch with feeder cable, then you're going to have hopefully a different connector, you know, an L620 or an L630. 

You could have PowerCon. But when you connect your load, it's going to be connected from phase to phase. In other words, it'll go from black to red. Red to blue, like circuit one will be black to red, circuit two, red to blue, circuit three, blue to black, and then start over again, again because we want to connect our loads in a balanced configuration. 

So um, you know, that's the difference between 120 or 208, or technically it's phase to neutral or phase to phase, and that would be in North America. Now in Europe it's a whole different system, but you know, same, same idea. 

Andy Leviss: So we mentioned balancing the loads on each of the phases, uh, for the, I, I think most of our listeners are at least familiar that that's a good idea to do, but I don't know that everybody understands why that's important. So, why don't we, why don't we talk about that a little bit. 

Richard Cadena: Yeah, well it's especially important on a portable power generator because it's what you call a soft supply, it's smaller, and it's more easily influenced by the load. So if you have a severely unbalanced load, that electrical imbalance translates to a mechanical imbalance on the generator. And if you've ever thrown your wash in the laundry and it all goes to one side and it starts, you know, knocking. 

Clump, clump, clump, you know, that's what the generator is doing. The generator will walk or it'll do, you know, and you can actually damage the generator. It'll also potentially distort the waveform, the voltage waveform. So you get some, you know, some weird things happening there. And that's primarily what you're concerned with, with on grid power or shore power or building power, whatever you want to call it. 

If you have a severely unbalanced load, then you run the risk of Uh, having voltage distortion which can affect you, especially the sound, you know, it can affect the sound. Um, the irony is that regardless of how we connect the load, as soon as the lighting guy fires the first cue or the video, goes off, or even audio, it throws everything out of balance because it's variable loads, right, depending on the content. 

So, but you at least try to start with as balanced a load as possible. 

Sean Walker: So don't put all your subwoofers on one leg of power, 

Richard Cadena: Exactly. Yes. Yeah. Don't put all your follow spots on one leg. Don't put all your subs on one 

Sean Walker: I kinda wanna try it to see if I can just literally tip the generator over behind the stage, just BOOM! 

Andy Leviss: Just generated there doing the Genesis I can't dance walk across the 

Sean Walker: HAHAHAHA! Thump, thump, down the road. Just HAHAHA! 

Richard Cadena: it sounds like something that I would do for fun at a lab, you know, we do crazy stuff. You know how they always tell you never coil your excess feeder cable? What do we do at our hands on classes? We coil the feeder cable, let's just see what happens. 

Sean Walker: What happens? 

Richard Cadena: Uh, you make a big, giant electromagnetic, uh, electromagnet and the audio people go nuts. 

Sean Walker: Nice. 

Andy Leviss: How many coils does it have to have to get toasty? 

Richard Cadena: Yeah, it depends on how far the audio cable is, but if, you know, if you run the audio cable close to it, it doesn't take that many coils. Mm 

Andy Leviss: Alright. Um, I mean, I think the logical, like, practical question I go to from there once we're talking about phases is neutral sizing versus, uh, versus, like, line conductors. Because again, that's a thing that I feel like a lot of people either just take for granted because they're getting bundle sets of feeder or just don't know to ask the question. 

Richard Cadena: Right. So, it's, it is a good practice to oversize the neutral, especially if you know you have a lot of harmonics. You know, that's basically anything with a switch mode power supply or a computer chip in it potentially can generate harmonics in the 

Andy Leviss: nothing we use in SoundWorld at all. 

Richard Cadena: No, nothing at all, no, right, right. So what can happen, you know, normally when you have a balanced load, there's no current on the neutral because the neutral is carrying the return current for all three hot phases, hot legs, but they're out of phase with each other, so it cancels out. 

But, when you have harmonics, they actually reinforce, and so you get very high current in the neutral, so you need a bigger neutral conductor. Now, it's not just a matter of, you know, you can double the neutral, but that means you need Everything in the system has to be, uh, the neutral has to be oversized. 

That means the feeder transformer, the switch, uh, if you're using a portable power generator, usually there is a, um, a lot of, a lot of them have a cam bus, so that there's usually four sets of cams on it. So you can easily double the neutral. That's called double pumping in the film industry. That allows you to never Yeah, exactly. So, um, so, now I lost my train of thought. No, I didn't. No. So, you can, you can double pump, double pump the neutral so that you don't never have to worry about overloading it. Because a neutral conductor actually has no fuse and no circuit breakers. So if you are carrying too much current on the neutral, you can literally burn it up. 

And I don't mean it's going to like go up in smoke, but what's going to happen is, you know, when you overheat a conductor, the first, the weak link, the first thing that happens is the insulation starts to break down. And if the insulation becomes brittle and cracks and crumbles, then you have a shock hazard and a potential fire hazard. 

Sean Walker: Okay. So if we're in layman's terms and it's, it's half a question, half a statement. So I'm trying to clarify for myself, if you've got standard, you know, like number two feeder or whatever, are you thinking like number two feeder is cool for all of it? And then like a two ought for the neutral to make it oversized would be a better bundle than buying all five at the same time kind of thing. 

Is that what you're, is that The 

Richard Cadena: Right. Yeah. Yes, you can absolutely do that, however, if you have a 100 amp distro, then your 2 aught feet neutral is being connected back to a 100 amp bus, so it doesn't really do you any good. What you need is a 200 amp distro and 2 aught with, but you're only, um, You're only drawing 100 amps, so you're effectively derating your distro 50%, which there's nothing wrong with that, you can do that and accomplish the same thing. 

It's just that all of your buses will now be 200 amp buses, but you're only treating it as a 100 amp bus. That's essentially what you're doing by using number 2 wire with a 2 watt neutral conductor. 

Sean Walker: I guess I, I misunderstood the, the question or statement. Well, you were saying you should oversize the neutral wire, right? 

Richard Cadena: That's right. 

Sean Walker: So if, if we got, you know, five number two wires coming out for our standard five pack the order, do we need something else for the neutral? I 

Richard Cadena: Well, again, you can, yeah, so you can have, um, number 2 wire for everything and then use 2 0 for the neutral. That does oversize the neutral. But what are you going to connect the neutral to? 

Sean Walker: mean, it's all going to the same distro, right? 

Richard Cadena: Yeah, the distro, if you connect it to a 100 amp distro, which is what number 2 wire is for, then Your two aught, your oversized neutral is not really doing any good because your, the distro is the bottleneck in the whole system. 

Sean Walker: I understand what you're saying now. It's not just the wire, it's the entire thing makes the 

Richard Cadena: Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. So when you go into a theater, for example, and you see a switch on the wall that has two neutrals, that actually has two neutrals all the way back to the feeder transformer. 

And the feeder transformer itself has an oversized neutral inside of the feeder transformer. So it's through and through. 

Andy Leviss: gotcha. Yeah, I'm trying to, there's like three different directions we can peel off from there, like all of which I want to, I want to touch on. So I'm 

Sean Walker: Get to peeling, bro. 

Andy Leviss: yeah, I mean, I mean, as long as we're on the subject of like neutral and ground bonding, I think that's, that was a question that we said came up, uh, came up a bunch and, um, isolation transfers, I know in the Broadway world are super common. 

I feel like I see them much less often in the concert world, but not. Not never. And then I know we have some of our, uh, our friends who are touring acts that cross between here and Europe, also deal with step up transformers, which have some of those same ground neutral, uh, I don't know if concern's the right word. 

I think confusion is, is more the right word. Um, so why don't we, why don't we talk a little bit about that, about like, where should ground and neutral be bonded? Where should they not? 

Richard Cadena: Yeah. Well, first of all, they should be bonded. Because if they're not bonded, that's not a safe system. And what will happen is if there is no bond, then if there is a short circuit to the chassis, then the circuit breaker will not trip, which leaves stray voltage, you know, very dangerous stray voltage. 

So, if you take your Multimeter, and you put it in continuity mode, and you check for continuity anywhere in the electrical system between the green wire and the white wire, you should have continuity. But the thing is, it should only be bonded once in the entire system, and it's either bonded in the feeder transformer or generator. 

Or the first panel after the feeder transformer or the generator. And the, um, the curveball is that in RVs, um, there's a bay for a generator and then it's close to the circuit breaker panel and it's, it's usually bonded in the breaker panel, not in the generator. So there's a lot of small putt putt generators out there that are not bonded. 

So, if you take a putt putt and you go shoot a film on location and you don't check for the bond, then you could be, uh, you know, you could, somebody could get hurt. So, you should always check for a bond, especially on generators, you know. Now, um, I've also heard a couple of stories about feeder transformers in buildings. 

that were either not bonded or there was two bonds in the system, you know. So there should, again, there should be one bond, and if they're not bonded, then, uh, you know, I've heard people say that they've run into issues with, um, weird stray voltages and that kind of stuff, which makes, which does make sense. 

Um, and then I've also heard a story, I was working in an arena, I won't say which one, but the, one of the electricians in there told me that, um, that several years prior that a band came into play and they had a ground loop, and they had that 60 hertz hum that you're well familiar with, right? And so they wanted to lift the ground. 

So one of the house electricians Um, saw what they were doing, and they said, well, wait a minute, why don't we just undo the bond in the feeder transformer, because they had all these portable feeder transformers. They go, if we unbond the feeder transformer, then you don't have to lift the ground, it's already done, you know, there's no connection. 

So they actually opened up the feeder transformer, took out the bond on all of their feeder transformers, and for years, their transformers were not bonded, which is not safe. You know, fortunately that situation was rectified because I checked when I went in there to do a show and they're all bonded now. 

But it is important that they're bonded because otherwise that can be disastrous. So, but, um, you know, the other thing is if you have a secondary bond, then what happens is you start having current in the grounding conductor, you know, there's not supposed to be any current in the ground unless something goes wrong, you know, if there's a short circuit. 

So if you have a bond in the feeder transformer And, in a panel, or in a, sometimes even fixtures, or, you know, amplifiers, people will, will connect the, the ground and the neutral together, they'll bond them. And what that does is it causes a parallel path for return current. So you have your outgoing current on the hot conductor and return current on, that's shared between the neutral and the ground. 

So you have high current in the green grounding conductor, which causes all kinds of problems. It's, it's a, um, it can be a shock hazard, it causes noise in the audio system or video, and it's, it's never good. So there should only be one bond. 

Sean Walker: And can you reiterate, yeah, yeah, can you reiterate how, how we check for that one more time since we've started and then went through the long process and then now let's reiterate how we, for us, us laymans, how do we check for that? 

Richard Cadena: Yeah, it's real simple. We'll take a multimeter. Put it in continuity mode and put one probe anywhere in the electrical system on a white conductor or terminal and the other on a green terminal. So what I do is I like to take a, uh, I don't know what you guys call them, a stinger cable or extension cord or an Edison and plug it into anywhere in the electrical system. 

And, uh, then I can carry it around with me and I can check to make sure that, uh, everything is bonded, like stages are bonded correctly, and that, um, you know, it minimizes stray voltages. But also you can just do a quick check for continuity between the green and white, make sure you have continuity. 

Andy Leviss: So, and that'll tell you if you do have a bond. Now, what gets trickier to check is, is discovering if you've got multiple bonds, or if, like, I know, I know there's some, like, I, some of the ideal testers have ways of testing for that. I don't know, are there any other good ways other than just hunting it down? 

Richard Cadena: well, I just meter the, the ground, uh, the ground conductor feeder cable. And if you have more than, I would say, like, uh, than about a half an amp, you know, then there's likely, there's likely something wrong with this system. Although I, you know, that could be caused by a couple of different things. You know, as soon as a cable is made, the insulation starts to deteriorate and the older it gets, the more it dries out and cracks and the more leakage current. 

It allows, so, 

Andy Leviss: I feel ya. 

Richard Cadena: right? And so, um, I've seen some systems, just because the insulation is so bad, that it leaks tens of amps. You know, 10, 11, 12, 13 amps. Good cables won't do that. New cable, fresh cable won't do that. But if there's a secondary bond, then you'll start to get a lot of current in the grounding conductor. 

So, if you see it in the feeder, then what I, the way I would One way to sort that out is try to turn off as many loads as you can or disconnect them and then reconnect them one at a time and turn them on one at a time and monitor the ground current. And as soon as you, if you find something that has a secondary bond, as soon as you connect it or turn it on, you'll see the current jump and that's your clue where to start looking. 

Sometimes it's in a panel. You know, commercial electricians will often automatically bond the neutral and the ground in every panel. Because, you know, if you're doing a, an apartment complex, that's the way you do it, you know, because every apartment has its own meter. But that's not how you do it in our world, but they will often, uh, make that connection in every single panel. 

In which case, now you've got a lot of what they call, the National Electrical Code calls objectionable current. That just means there's current in the grounding conductor when it shouldn't be there, you know. So, in that case, you would have to disconnect. The panels themselves until the current goes away and then start reconnecting panels if you have that ability. 

Andy Leviss: Right on. And for the record, Objectional Current is the name of my AC DC cover band. 

Richard Cadena: I love it. I love it. Mine is square root of three. 

Andy Leviss: Do you have a number where you just stand there up on stage for like three minutes without any sound and it's the imaginary number? 

Richard Cadena: Yes, the Cage version. The John Cage version. 

Andy Leviss: Um, yeah, um, on the, on the, we were talking a little bit about phases and one question that actually came up elsewhere in my world recently on one of the chain hoist groups was talking about phase converters, because, uh, like chain hoists, the world used to need three phase power for that motor to rotate. 

And, uh, folks were talking about like when you're in a room that you only have single phase power, getting that to work and that apparently there are, are converters that. Can basically turn single phase into triple phase. 

Richard Cadena: Yeah, I think they're rare. I mean, sure, you can do that. Basically what you're doing is you're taking any power and you are running it through a, uh, an inverter to turn it into DC to charge up a battery and then you have three inverters to, to turn it into three AC waveforms. So, if you're going to do that, why not just use a battery inverter system to begin with, you know? 

I've been working a lot lately with battery inverter systems. Um, we, I mean, big, on large, on a large scale, we did Lollapalooza with, um, a dozen. 60 kilowatt, 120 kilowatt hour battery inverter systems in a, in a big solar farm. And we're doing, we did, uh, Willie Nelson's Luck Reunion last year, powered a bunch of stages with that. 

We're doing it again this year. We're doing South By, um, and that's a, an area that's really developing a lot. I mean, not to get off, off subject here, but that's essentially what, you know, it's the same thing, just on a different scale. 

Andy Leviss: Oh, that's cool. And that's, that was definitely a little further down the list of things I wanted to ask you about was some of that stuff. Cause that's a, that's a really cool, I mean, we talk, we think about going like solar and battery power for our houses all the time, but it's sort of, it, I don't know that we don't necessarily think of it, it's just, it's not. 

Widely known that, like, you can expand that out to, like, a full production scale, so yeah, I'd certainly love to hear more about that. 

Richard Cadena: yeah, it is scalable and it's uh, it's kind of funny because when we first started doing this and we'd build a solar farm and I'd take a picture of myself in front of it and post it on Facebook and there are a lot of naysayers and not, not a lot, but you know, some small percentage of people who say, oh, you can't do that. 

We're like, really? Because we're yeah, yeah. I think we're doing it right now. We're doing it, you know, and uh, we've scaled it up and we've, we've done, I mean we haven't, so we did the floor pack, we did, we, we've provided five services for Billy Eilish's set at Lollapalooza, and that was for the lighting floor package, the video floor package, the video world, audio world, monitor world, and backline, and uh, special effects, and, you know, most All of those stages could be run off of those five services that we provided. 

This just happened to be a really, really big stage. Now, they initially asked us to do all of the lighting, but we declined because we wanted to take it in steps. Um, because this is the largest system, I believe, that's probably ever been assembled like this before, at least the manufacturer of the battery inverters who came out and witnessed it. 

They said, yeah, we've never seen this many connected together before. And so Um, you know, it's, it is definitely scalable. You can do any size show with it and there's lots of advantages to it. Um, I mean, that's a little bit off of subject from, from what you're talking about, inverting power for, uh, three, you know, single phase to three phase, but it's the same principle. 

It's exact same thing. 

Andy Leviss: Gotcha. Yeah, no, that makes sense, that makes sense, and that's, it's a cool tangent to take it in. Um, I'm curious, like, we could go deep down the rabbit hole of, like, I'm curious what the, like, what the truck size and, like, travel, you know, and freight implications of that versus, like, generators is and how that 

Richard Cadena: Yeah, 

Andy Leviss: up, which, I mean, we could probably dive into that for, like, half an hour on its own. 

Richard Cadena: right, but the quick version is that I did the math and so, uh, and I wish I had the numbers. If I didn't know and you were going to ask, I'd have pulled it up, but, but it's basically not much. So, so these were big units. They weigh 6, 000 pounds a piece and they had to be brought in to Chicago from Fort Wayne, Indiana. 

And so I did the math. And figured out that it would cost something like, um, I forget how many gallons of fuel it was, how many gallons of diesel. But it was a very, very small amount compared to the amount of diesel fuel that would have been burned to replace our solar power. It's not even close. So, you know, people often mention, oh yeah, what's the carbon footprint of transporting these big giant units, which is valid that, you know, but, um, in the, yeah, it's not insignificant, but in the big scheme of things, we are reducing the carbon footprint, and that, that's really what matters. 

Andy Leviss: That's great, and yeah, that's an awesome thing to keep doing. Do you know, so I know most of the stuff you've mentioned has been like one off and festival kind of things. Do you know, are any tours doing that yet, or is that still 

Richard Cadena: Yeah, coal. Coldplay has been doing it for a long time. Now, um, I don't know much about the Coldplay other than what I've read, and I know they got in trouble with the press because they were supposed to be using, um, recycled cooking oil in their generators, but, but they were, they've been accused of using virgin palm oil, and I don't, and, which involves clear cutting forests, and I, I don't know enough to Uh, to speak about that other than I know that it was in the press, and so they've been kind of low key about what they're doing, but they're really, you know, they're doing a lot. 

They're, they're touring the whole world with a lot of, um, renewables. Now, some of it I think is a little bit gimmicky. They have the, the, The bicycles you ride to power the stage, and if you do the math on that, you know, they're not, they're not providing a lot of power, but it's a good gesture. They also have the kinetic dance floor so you can dance the, the lights on stage on, you know, but, but again, you know, piezoelectric, yeah, it's not, a huge generator. 

You know, it's not going to produce a huge amount of energy, I should say. But I like that they're doing it. I like, I like the approach. 

Andy Leviss: That's great 

Richard Cadena: basically what they're doing, yeah, basically what they're doing is raising awareness, which, which needs to be done. We need to be more aware of what we're doing. 

Um, to the planet. 

Sean Walker: Man, I feel like if they're not getting enough energy from the bikes, they just need to put my kids on the bikes cause I feel like they got never ending energy, dude. Like, it never stops. You're like, dude, it's been 10 hours of you ripping around on this bicycle, you've been skating and riding and skateboarding and roller skating. 

You're still not tired? Damn it! 

Andy Leviss: Hey, keep going. Keep going. Daddy's daddy's got to do an encore. Daddy's got to do an encore. 

Sean Walker: Totally! Totally! 

Richard Cadena: That's great. That's awesome. Uh. They 

Sean Walker: people at the festival, like, three pedals, and they're like, We're out! Totally. 

Richard Cadena: fall 

Andy Leviss: power the next song, man. 

Sean Walker: right. 

Andy Leviss: It's like that. Now you did it. You powered a cord. You barely powered a power cord. 

Sean Walker: Yeah, right. 

Richard Cadena: Right. Uh. 

Andy Leviss: us. Bringing us back around to like not not to get all technical again for us, but um, we talked about balancing loads I know another subject came up that I think people often confuse with that is balance power, which sort of I feel like had Like as far as like noise things like had a like brief little almost heyday in like the early to mid 2000s and sort of seems to fade it away again Like can you explain a little bit about the idea there if you're familiar with it and and what works or doesn't there? 

Richard Cadena: yeah, it's really, it's really, it's really a brilliant idea. So you just take a 120 volt transformer and you put a center tap in it, and you ground that. So that becomes your zero volts, and now you have one hot that is 60 volts, and another hot that's 60 volts, and they're 180 degrees out of phase, so you get 120 volts across. 

The two hot conductors, but the magic is that the, any noise that's induced into the, the hot conductors cancels out because they're 180 degrees out of phase with each other. So it really does work well to, um, lower the noise floor and give you more headroom. So I think now you typically see it in recording studios. 

And so now in order for this to work well, You have to, if there's a lot of electromagnetic interference that gets induced into the conductors, it has to be induced equally on both conductors, so you have to twist the wires together, like the tighter the better. And 

Andy Leviss: so it's almost exactly like what we're doing with audio cables, just doing it with power as well, 

Richard Cadena: that's right, exactly, it's noise rejection. It's balanced XLR noise rejection. Now, the difference is that in the, um, in the audio amp, there's going to be, uh, the ground doesn't come into play. It's just a, um, it's, it's a, it's a balanced, um, you know, balanced amplifier, balanced signal amplifier. So there's no ground introduced into that. 

Sean Walker: Yeah, but the magic really comes from the 50 transformer that you use, and then you can sell it to HiFi guys for like 500 grand for their audio system in a beautiful package and, you know, sell three of those and you can retire. 

Richard Cadena: I like the way you think. 

Sean Walker: Yeah. Yeah. 

Andy Leviss: It's always about the money with Sean. 

Sean Walker: That's right. 

Andy Leviss: Oh, I mean on 

Sean Walker: ain't going to pay itself, dog. 

Andy Leviss: did, did, there was that homo limiter out for a while, which, did they finally get rid of that though, was it the EBTEC, I think? I, I, I don't want to throw them under the bus if it wasn't then, but it was like, it was incredibly unsafe. It was like capacitors between the, like, you know what I'm talking about? 

I might have 

Richard Cadena: the HumEx, yeah, 

Andy Leviss: Yeah, yep, the hum, yeah. 

Richard Cadena: yeah. Um, I don't know if they got rid of it, but I, you know, I looked at the schematic, because first of all, they don't, they don't reveal the schematic, but people took it apart and drew the schematic, and you look at the schematic and go, well, that's just two inverted diodes. How does that work? 

I never understood what they were trying to do with that. But Yeah, there you 

Sean Walker: That's how that works. Marketing. Monster cables and hum eliminators. 

Richard Cadena: Yeah. Yeah. Solid gold conductor. That's what you need. 

Sean Walker: Yeah, dog. It sounds twice as good, man. 

Andy Leviss: Uh, 

Richard Cadena: Mm-Hmm, 

Andy Leviss: so my, my last kind of big power question before we get to, I've got some like smaller and more practical stuff I wanted to ask you about before we left. But one question that came up in the comments that I was about, uh, pretty late with isolation transformers, like what kind of maintenance is needed on those, which kind of perked my eyes up. 

Cause it's, I certainly fall in the camp of like maintenance. It's a transformer. It just sits there. So I wanted to pass that question on to you because you can speak much more intelligently about that than clearly I can. 

Richard Cadena: Yeah. I saw that que that, that post, and I thought the same thing you did. It's like, wait a minute. What? How do you maintain a, a, a feeder transformer? But I, I know, I know this. So when they make a transformer and it's brand new, the insulation, you know, the windings isn't, are insulated, right? It's, it's a, they use magnet wires, so it's kind of varnish. 

is the insulation. And as soon as it's made, the insulation starts to deteriorate. And over time, you know, the insulation, um, breaks down, and you start getting leakage, and you start getting inefficiencies. You know, and the way inefficiency manifests in a feeder transformer is that it turns the electricity into heat. 

and into noise. So, when you have a brand new feeder transformer, it should be relatively cool, I mean not cool, but it should not get too hot, and it should be relatively quiet, even at full load. So, if you have two feeder transformers side by side, both carrying the same load, and one is way louder than the other, And one is hotter than the other, then you can tell that one is, is in, the one that's hotter and louder is in failure mode. 

It's eventually going to fail. You know, these transformers will, they should last decades, but if you run them hard all the time, they're going to fail prematurely. And that's what I've seen before. Now, the, the only way to fix them is to send them back to the, to be remanufactured and that's expensive. And, and, um, As far as maintenance goes, I don't know of any maintenance other than to make sure that there's no dust bunnies inside of them, make sure that the connectors are in good condition, all that kind of stuff. 

Now, what the guy ended up saying on his post is that that particular transformer was not bonded, which is an entirely different thing because, you know, the feeder transformers are normally bonded in the feeder transformer, and that should never change. Now, if it's a portable feeder transformer, I could see how maybe somebody, for some reason, might disconnect, you know, take out the bond and then bond it in the, in the, in the panel, the first panel after it. 

But that doesn't even make a lot of sense to me. So, um, When, when I go into a venue, you know, the first thing I like to do is to do a visual inspection of the feeder transformer. If I can find it, if I can get to it, sometimes there's no access or sometimes it's off premises, but if you can see it, you want to make sure that it's visually in good condition. 

You know, it's not a rust bucket, you know, um, and make sure that it's not too hot, too loud, especially if there's no load connected to it, you don't, you don't want it to be too loud. And then also, I will also check to make sure that it is bonded. Now, there was a period of time where I was, um, very often checking for bonding and feeder transformers in buildings because I'd read an article about some people who were fatally electrocuted because there was, um, um, a feeder transformer that was not properly bonded. 

But, I did that for probably about a year and I stopped doing it because I never found one that wasn't bonded and I figured, you know, if it wasn't bonded, somebody would have found it long before I got there. But for portable transformers, I always check them to make sure they're bonded. But as far as, you know, For me, maintenance would be if I look at a feeder transformer and I'm like, yeah, that won't work, then my maintenance is I pick up, you know, the radio and call for another one, right? 

Because usually in our venues, in our arenas, there's more than one available, right? So, other than that, I don't know of any maintenance that, that can be done on a feeder transformer. And I, I do a lot of electrical inspections at theaters and amusement parks. And, you know, part of, uh, that job is to, is to do an inspection of the feeder transformers. 

But unless it's a, unless it's a utility type transformer, you know, those are oil filled. If you see those big giant, If you, if you're driving by a switch yard and you see a big giant transformer, those actually have oil in them. Now that, that's a different story, because yeah, periodically the oil has to be drained and replaced, but it's decades and decades before that has to happen. 

Andy Leviss: And what is the oil doing in those? 

Richard Cadena: It's for cooling. 

Andy Leviss: Okay. 

Richard Cadena: Yeah. 

Andy Leviss: Um, and then, and, and then, and on, I just want to revisit and kind of summarize the thing we talked about earlier, just as I'm looking down the list of questions of folks is, is we're talking about feeder transformers and where the bond should be. And, and the one thing that came up a lot was with either like particularly Broadway shows that are, uh, traveling their own isolation transformers. 

Or, uh, shows with, like, international acts that are touring their own, uh, step up or step down transformers is that, um, is that there's usually, there's not going to be a neutral feeding into that transformer, but there's one feeding out, which tends to throw people who aren't familiar with them out, and that's because that transformer is basically generating a new And a new isolated set of power, it's isolating the ground through the transformer, and it's generating the neutral in the bond coming on the, on the service side of that transformer. 

Richard Cadena: Yeah, so it really depends on what kind of transformer it is. If it's a 480 volt to 122. 08, then there's no neutral. Because, um, the incoming power is a delta. The windings are connected in a delta, which means there is no neutral point in a delta connection. So, Um, you would have your, your three hot conductors and your ground. 

The ground is very important, but you don't have a neutral. And yes, you're right because, you know, the neutral is, there's two, uh, two purposes for the neutral. One is, it's the return path for your three hot conductors if it's phased to neutral current, you know, 120 volts mostly. And the other reason is for, it's your zero volt. 

It's your zero volt, and the neutral, and here's why the neutral and the ground are connected together, because the ground is connected to earth, and the earth is zero volts, so your neutral becomes your zero volt reference. And when you connect a bunch of load to a three phase feeder transformer, if it's an unbalanced load, and you didn't have a connection to the earth, then your zero volt point would drift around in and find its own balance. 

So what that means is that some of the legs will go high in voltage and some would go low, but the, um, it just depends on the connected load. So that's why we have a neutral. But on the incoming side, the, uh, the three hot conductors are, um, connected, or sorry, the three windings are connected. in series with each other in a delta fashion, not in a Y. 

So there is no neutral point. So that's why you don't need the neutral. 

Andy Leviss: Gotcha. And yeah, and then the other place I see people confused is when you've got just a straight up isolation transformer. So you've got a 120 208 to 120 208, but maybe the building doesn't have an isolated audio ground and you need or want that, so you bring a transformer there. And there, it's the same thing. 

It's because that is now your feeder transformer, effectively. You've added a secondary one. So you're not going to, having a neutral go into it would then be basically giving you a double bond. I thi or it just, I guess it just doesn't come into play at all because it's going, it's on the other side of the transformer. 

Richard Cadena: Yeah. Well, again, uh, you don't need the neutral because, um, well, wait a minute. Sorry. If it's, it, again, it depends on the connection of the transformer. If the trans, it's not, it doesn't matter whether it's, uh, 120 208 coming in. What matters is how the windings are connected. And typically they're connected in a, in a, um, in a delta, which means they're connected end to end to end and there is no place to connect the neutral. 

There is no, there's no neutral point. So what's the point of bringing the conductor when there's nowhere to connect it, right? 

Andy Leviss: And, and, and again, on the outside of that feeding your power distro on the audio on the isolated side of it, you are generating a neutral there by nature of bonding it on the, on that side of the transformer. 

Richard Cadena: Exactly. Yeah, it has to be bonded on the secondary side and that needs to be Earthed. So, now when I say earthed, most of the time you guys connect it to a cold water pipe, which is fine, because a cold water pipe is connected to the earth. So you are, you know, virtually connecting it to the earth. The point is that there is no, um, voltage on that pipe, because it is, Literally connected to the earth and the earth, the voltage of the earth is zero. 

So now it is important you're supposed to make that connection within five feet of that water pipe connecting to the building to make sure that it doesn't turn to PVC somewhere and it's not isolated from the building. Because if you happen to connect to a metal water pipe, but then it's isolated from, from ground, that's not good. 

Andy Leviss: Interesting. So it's not, so the five foot isn't the, isn't like an impedance thing. It's literally because that way you can see it's going all the way to ground. 

Richard Cadena: Right, yeah, there's, it's less likely that there's a change from metal to PVC, which would isolate it. You know, but you can always check it. Once you bond, once you, once you make your connection, once you take that green conductor and connect it to the pipe, then you should check the impedance. Take your multimeter, put it in ohms mode, and check from electrical ground to building steel, and you should have very low impedance, like maybe half an amp. 

I mean half an amp, half an ohm. 

Andy Leviss: Okay. Right on. Um, and that, that leads me to, I was going to bring it back to a couple more practical questions. And one of those is, uh, choosing a meter. You're going out to buy a, a multimeter clamp meter for a show. I know one of the lessons I learned from you years ago was the different categories of meters and which ones we need for different things. 

So if If you give folks a little, a little look at that, I think that would help folks out because I feel like a lot of us are buying, like, just cheap meters off the shelf at Home Depot that don't know what it is there isn't protecting them from when they're measuring, or likewise, they're spending way too much more than they need to on, like, a top of the line Fluke they don't need. 

Richard Cadena: Right, yeah, I actually bought my, one of my meters I bought at Lowe's, but it's a Fluke 323, which is a Category 3 up to 600 volts and a Category 4 up to 300 volts. Now, so meters are categorized according to how well they protect you. against things like voltage surges and lightning strikes. Because if you happen to be metering, you know, if you take your volt probe, you take the probes in your, and you put them on terminals and there's a lightning strike to the building. 

If you have a category one or category two meter, and this has actually happened. in the past where there was a lightning strike, the meter blew up and it actually killed the electrician and a fire marshal who was standing behind him. So if you want to read that story, go look for, um, there's a magazine called EC& M, Electrical Contractor Maintenance, and, um, the article is called a, a case, a case study of a deadly for, um, A deadly arc flash. 

I think it is the forensic study of a deadly arc flash. So yeah, you want to get at least a category three. So category three meter is good for metering at distros, and you know, further upstream, like on the secondary side of feeder transformers, but the primary side of feeder transformers and outside on generators use a category four meter. 

So category two is for, uh, receptacles, you know, like, uh, Edison receptacles, breakouts, that kind of thing, because the wires are relatively small, you know. So when you have smaller wires, there's less energy that can get through them. So if something goes wrong, it's not going to be catastrophic. Whereas, you know, different story on a feeder circuit. 

When you're talking about 4 watt or 2 watt feeder, and you're also closer to the source of energy, which is the transformer, the grid, you know, so that's why you need a higher category of meter, the further upstream you are. You know, also when it comes to meters, like somebody emailed me the other day and said they were looking at a C800 meter, I forget the brand name now, um, I'll think of it in a minute, but, um, I looked at the specs and this meter was a very nice meter. 

It had an amp clamp. You know, I think what we need in our industry is we need to be able to clamp conductors and read amps up to 400 amps. We need to be able to read voltage with the volt meter and we need continuity. Uh, tester to test fuses and if you're, um, a lighting guy to test the, um, tungsten filaments to see if they're blown. 

Other than that, we don't need capacitor testers or inductor or temperature and, and this particular meter had capacitor tester and it had temperature probe on it and it cost like 200 more than the next lower model, which was a C600, and it didn't have the capacitor and temperature on it. So I said, yeah, you don't need the 800, just buy the 600. 

So he saved a couple hundred bucks. 

Sean Walker: So could you make a couple of recommendations of like what you have found to be a good quality Cat 3 and Cat 4 meters that maybe don't blow the budget but are a good, reliable, well built product? 

Richard Cadena: Yeah, my workhorse is a Fluke 323, and it cost 125. That was before the pandemic, so it might have changed by now. But it's 

Sean Walker: now it's a thousand bucks? 

Richard Cadena: yeah, but it's still a category 3 up to 600 volts and category 4 up to 300 volts. Which, you know, Yeah. That's the vast majority of stuff we do, that's, that's plenty. Now the next one up from that, and I forget the model number, is a Category 4 up to 600 volts and a Category 3 up to 1000 volts. 

So if I had, if I had a, um, you know, a bit of money to spend, because that would probably cost around, I want to say 250. So I'd probably get the next model up if I wanted to spend that much money. Now there are also some really cool meters like there's a FLIR meter that has a built in infrared camera and I use infrared cameras when I'm an Emmy on a show. 

I use my infrared camera a lot because it can instantly tell you if you've got a problem by looking at the heat map of your power distribution system. And it has saved me several times on shows and prevented disaster. So, but I use my, my, uh, IR camera is a FLIR 1. It costs 200 bucks and it pops onto your iPhone or your Android, but they do have FLIR amp meters. 

or multimeters with the built in IR camera in it, and those are 600. Um, I was thinking about getting one, I might still, but what I do like about that one is that it uses a 9 volt battery instead of the, one of those coin batteries, because my FLIR 1, the battery's always dead, and the battery doesn't last long, less about an hour, and that's not long enough, you know, so not real happy with that aspect of it. 

Sean Walker: A quick search of everybody's favorite purchasing website here. 118. 39 for the 323. So yeah, exactly what 

Richard Cadena: it went down. Oh, nice. 

Sean Walker: Then you can get like a combo kit? Yep. 

Andy Leviss: I'll throw out or throw out for Rich to either yay, nay, or indifferent on is I've, the last decade or so, also been a fan of Ideal's meters, which also offer similar ratings. Certifications, Calibrations, TaFluke, but, uh, both aren't quite as expensive. And one of the things, I don't know if you've seen, they, they have the tight sight line of meters, which for the clamp meter, there's a little extra LED or LCD display in the butt of the meter. 

So when you're sitting there and you have to clamp around feeder, like going into a panel. It makes it a lot easier to see it. And they also tend to be cheaper than the comparable, um, Flukes because they're Fluke being who and what they are. There is a little bit of a Fluke tax for the name. Um, 

Sean Walker: This idea looks like it's 85 bucks on the same thing for the same kind of a thing. 

Richard Cadena: I love that idea, though, because I'm always contorting myself trying to read the face of the meter. 

Andy Leviss: that was, I didn't buy it for that and I thought it was a stupid gimmick and then the first time I had to use it I was like, oh, I don't ever want, want to meter that. Doesn't have that again. 

Richard Cadena: Yeah, no, I have never seen those meters, but that sounds good. I do have an ideal circuit analyzer, which I use all the time because it tells you if your circuit, if, if a circuit is wired correctly, it tells you the, uh, impedance of the, of all three conductors. It tells you the volt drop, voltage drop. So it's got a lot of information and, uh, it really comes in handy. 

Andy Leviss: Yeah, that's I was mentioning that briefly before is the one tester I know of that will actually like out of the box test for what they call a false ground, which is what we were talking about earlier, basically a secondary ground neutral bond. And yeah, they're great. It's the their base mode for those aren't familiar with them, basically emulates one of those neon outlet testers. 

But It can test for all these other things Rich mentioned that are, that a Neon Outlet tester can't, and it can test for some unsafe conditions that a Neon tester will completely miss. It's, they're not without their own flaws, like that's getting into the weeds of, of some ECM articles as well. But, they're super powerful tools. 

Richard Cadena: The one thing it won't catch is a bootleg ground with reverse hot and ground, reverse neutral ground, um, but so to catch that you need a non contact voltmeter and that will catch the voltage, you'll, you'll be able to sniff voltage on the ground, uh, pin. So, that's, I mean I always carry one on my, on myself, on my back, in my back pocket when I'm working the 

Andy Leviss: basic safety, safety tools as far as I'm concerned. 

Richard Cadena: absolutely. 

Vital. 

Andy Leviss: which, 

Sean Walker: You mean like a little three light Edison tester? You plug it in and it just shows you all that. Are you 

Andy Leviss: uh, the, like the little chirpy pen. 

Richard Cadena: Yeah, chirpy 

Andy Leviss: wand with the little tip that you like, you turn it on and when you hold it near a line that's got power, the light flashes at you and it goes 

Sean Walker: No, that's cool. 

Andy Leviss: Uh, yeah, and they're like, they're not that expensive, 

Richard Cadena: they're 20 

Andy Leviss: yeah, 20 bucks or so for a cheap one. 

Richard Cadena: Yeah, yeah, 

Andy Leviss: And 

Sean Walker: I can get a magic wand for 20 bucks. I'm 

Richard Cadena: absolutely. Yeah, 

Andy Leviss: um, 

Richard Cadena: tool. 

Sean Walker: Dude. That's cool. 

Andy Leviss: yeah, if you're ever sticking your hand anywhere where it would be unsafe to stick it in if it's powered, it's, you should have one of those to just, like, I, I, 

Sean Walker: I'll just put one in every workbox. That's great. 

Andy Leviss: Yeah, and just, you know, yeah, that's, uh, one of those, like, trust but verify, like, somebody says it's unplugged, I'm gonna make sure just to, just before I stick my hand in there, cause my hair sticks up enough as it is, I don't, I don't need, 

Sean Walker: will you put, let's put some links on the show notes so people can find the wands and those Fluke meters and that ideal meter you got so that 

Andy Leviss: yeah, we'll, we'll post a bunch of links, um, and then the one other topic I wanted to get on before we let you go, uh, again, going further down the branch circuit is, can we talk, like, quad boxes, stringers, extension cables, what's legit? What's not, what's allowed, what's not. Um, I know like one of my pet peeves is how many companies use like the interior junction boxes with the knockouts as quad boxes, which is, is to my, is both against code and just really stupidly dangerous. 

So I want to kind of touch on that a little bit and about the other things we tend to do that either are Only kosher with footnotes or just aren't kosher at all and please stop doing that. 

Richard Cadena: yeah. Well, so, um, according to National Electrical Code, you're supposed to use a listed gear. So if you cobble together a quad box with some Edison receptacles on it, you know, that technically that's a code violation. And who knows who put it together? Is it really safe? So Yeah, there's lots of great solutions out there. 

Sure, they cost more money. You know, it's gonna cost you more to call up Lex and get a stream, you know, um, whatever solution they have that you need. But what does a 

Sean Walker: Rich, it hurts my feelings just saying Lex out loud, bro, let alone having to pay for it. 

Andy Leviss: They make some great stuff 

Sean Walker: Yeah, they do. They make some great stuff. I just, I look at that price list and I go, Oh, 

Richard Cadena: Yeah, 

Andy Leviss: But you know what, if you've ever tried, if you've ever tried wiring one of those rubber PowerCon, you know, chain your own quad box stringer things together yourself, you understand why they charge as 

Sean Walker: don't do that. I have a Garrett for that. I don't do that. I get a guy. Yeah, 

Richard Cadena: Yeah. So, but, and the other thing I see a lot is people abusing power strips. You know, plugging power strips into power strips into power strips. You know, that's not cool. Cause, you know, first of all, it's got, it's a 15 amp. Connector, so you only have 15 amps. Now most of them have little circuit breakers on them, but it takes time for the circuit breaker to trip, so you can literally melt the thing down. 

And if you're plugging a power strip into power strip, what are you doing? You know, you're, you, you, you are using the The wrong solution. There's a better way to do it, you know, they make stringer cables for that, right? So there's better ways to do that. That's, that's one of the things that you see a lot of in our, in our business, you 

Sean Walker: okay, so if quad boxes are out, what's in? 

Richard Cadena: Well, again, look through the LEX website. They have, uh, what do they call e stringers? They call e stringers, call them e stringers. So it's basically a, um, a receptacle, you know, every three feet on a 25 foot cable. But it's the right. Kind of cable, it's type S, it's, uh, it's all rubber or it's all plastic instead of metal, um, you know, it's just infinitely better. 

Andy Leviss: Yeah, and they and other companies make actual listed quad boxes where it's either whether it's a plastic enclosure or a rubber, like I said, the Lex ones I was mentioning and a few other brands make them in, uh, I think Motion Labs now makes one where it's in like a rubberized box and it's just rather than being wired permanently as a quad box stringer, it's just got a PowerCon blue and a PowerCon gray on either side or true one. 

And you can, you can put a power conda async cable on it and have a single quad. You can chain a couple of them together and make a stringer with whatever length between quad boxes you want. Obviously, you at that point have to be aware of how many you're stringing together and what the circuit can actually handle. 

Uh, cause it, it does physically give you the ability to get ridiculously long with those, which you don't want to do. 

Sean Walker: Oh, I see, this is just the rubberized quad boxes is what you're talking about, rather than the, 

Andy Leviss: Yeah, and the idea is that you're buying it as a pre made assembly, so that they've gotten that assembly UL listed and tested for safety is what's going to make it legit code wise. 

Richard Cadena: Exactly. Yeah. 

Andy Leviss: And aside from code, the other thing I was getting at with using those interior metal boxes As Quadboxes is when you're using the ones that have the knockout punches, those knockout punches knock in and it's very easy to drop that on a side, have it at a corner of a case and suddenly that's potentially shorting your hot on your neutral or your hot to your ground. 

Richard Cadena: Absolutely. 

Andy Leviss: that is one of the few really passive aggressive things I will do. If I see one that's even slightly broken or sometimes depending on the company, if I see them come out at all. I will make sure that one of those tabs is very obviously folded in in a way that's bad. Brightly label it, this is unsafe with an arrow pointing at why. 

This is why this is illegal to send out. Don't do it again. 

Richard Cadena: Yeah, that's a good idea. And also you see those, uh, the strain reliefs will get loose and the jacket, you know, the, the, the wires without the jacket will be sticking out of it, which is not, you know, that's not going to be safe for very long. So yeah. And yeah, you're right about the knockouts. Anytime you have, uh, yeah. 

Any critter has access, they will get in there, they'll chew the wires up, they'll chew the insulation, they'll cause a shock hazard, a fire hazard, and yeah, it's just a bad, it's a bad scenario. Absolutely. 

Sean Walker: so metal boxes out, rubberized boxes in. Damn it, Andy, you're the most expensive friend I've 

Andy Leviss: I See, but this is expensive in the short term, but long term it's saving you lawsuits and workers comp claims, so 

Richard Cadena: what's cheaper, a lawsuit 

Andy Leviss: it comes back around. 

Richard Cadena: or, or good gear? Definitely the good gear is cheaper. The good expensive gear is cheaper. 

Andy Leviss: Uh, I mean, I think we're kinda getting close to, I mean, we could, we could obviously go for hours and hours and maybe we bring you back on again if folks have more questions, but is there any last bit of advice, uh, 

Richard Cadena: Yes. I don't want to leave without saying, do not lift the ground. You know, that little three prong to two prong adapter is not, those are not, we call them ground lifts. They're not, that's not what they are. Those are to make the ground. If you have a three prong connector and you have an old building with the two prong receptacle, but in order to make it safe, you have to take the faceplate off, take that little screw, put it through the green tab and put the faceplate back, plug it in, screw it in. 

And if there's a metal junction box and metal. Uh, Conduit, now your equipment is now bonded properly or grounded properly, if you will. But if you don't do that, you're putting people's lives at risk. Now the last person that I'm aware of that died because of that was Augustine Briolini on November 22nd, 2014. 

So it's been 10 years, knock on wood. As far as I know that that's happened, that it's happened. It will happen again unless we stop that practice. We're only going to stop it by raising awareness, training people not to do it. There's better ways to resolve ground loops than by lifting the electrical ground. 

It's okay to break the safety ground. I'm sorry, to the signal ground, not the safety ground. Do not lift the ground. And that's what I want 

Andy Leviss: XLR ground lift good, Edison ground lift not good. 

Richard Cadena: not good. Not good at all. Yeah, exactly. 

Andy Leviss: Yeah, and we'll have to do, we had, we had uh, Pat Brown from SynAudCon on recently, and we've talked about having him on again, and I mean, we could easily do a whole episode with him just on troubleshooting grounds on Hum and Buzz, 

Richard Cadena: Yeah. 

Andy Leviss: like any of a couple of the other folks he's had teach workshops on that. 

And that's 

Richard Cadena: Yeah. It's 

Andy Leviss: should definitely revisit. 

Richard Cadena: Absolutely. 

Andy Leviss: all right, last but not least, uh, Texan. Uh, where are we going for food if we come? Are we going for barbecue? Down by you? Are we going for Tex-Mex? What's, uh, if we come to visit you, where should we go eat? 

Richard Cadena: So here's the thing, I moved to upstate New York, I actually live on Lake George now, and we, and we have the best restaurants, and I could not believe it, but that we have world class restaurants within an eight minute drive for us. So when you come up here, we're going to Bistro LaRue, and that is a Um, a small restaurant that was, um, so there was a guy who grew up in this area and then moved to San Francisco and went to culinary school, but his father wanted to entice him back to the area. 

So his father bought the restaurant on the condition that he, him and his wife would come back and run it. And they've been here now for, I think, eight years and it is fabulous food. It's really, really good. So that's where we're going. 

Sean Walker: I'm in. That sounds 

Andy Leviss: Now I'm just hungry. I've, I've been, I've been looking at last minute, uh, pivots for Valentine's Day. 'cause we weren't sure if we were gonna be home or not. And now I'm like, I was, I just got over all the hungry from looking over the menus and now I'm hungry again. Uh, 

Richard Cadena: come on, let's go. Come on 

Sean Walker: There you 

Andy Leviss: hop in the car. Uh, cool. 

Well, thanks so much for joining us. It's, I, I hope, like, and I hope if folks eyes glazed over as we got a little technical earlier on, we brought it back around. And, I mean, I would say this is an episode I will certainly go back and listen to a couple times, because there's lots of little important tidbits there, and this, like, of all the things we do outside of rigging, electricity is, like, one of the biggest safety things that we, we, Are all somewhat conscious of but I think need to be extra extra conscious of and and like you said there's always something to learn so 

Sean Walker: dude. Totally. Rich, I think I'll, I'll have you out to the, to the shop and you can teach some classes here and I'll invite whoever here in the signal noise wants to come and 

Richard Cadena: Let's do it. 

Sean Walker: old party at the shop. Anybody but Andy can come. He's too technical and he's making me throw out all my quad boxes so he can stay at home, but 

Andy Leviss: I'll be the guy sitting in the back with the screwdriver just punching in all the knockouts in 

Sean Walker: like, what box is this? You son of a bitch! 

Richard Cadena: my boxes alone!  

Andy Leviss: yeah, yeah, I'll be like literally Andy Fufu just popping all quad on the head 

Sean Walker: But we'll, we'll connect offline and try to set something up so you can come out and, and teach the world how to, you know, not kill us 

Andy Leviss: Yeah, and and you also do online classes as well, correct? 

Richard Cadena: Yeah, I have some online classes. So check out the website 

Sean Walker: In person, bad jokes, good food. That's 

Richard Cadena: yeah, exactly. Yep. You got it. 

Andy Leviss: Cool. So we'll, 

Sean Walker: coming out. 

Richard Cadena: My pleasure. Thank you so much for inviting me. I really enjoyed it. 

Andy Leviss: cool. Thanks a lot. And we will, we will make sure we link to all your websites all for folks who do want to take an online class or any of the in person ones you've got on the books right now, link to that in the show notes. Um, and I think on that note, we'll, we'll send us home. 

Sean Walker: Right on. Well, thank you to RCF and Allen and Heath, and thank you to everybody who's listening and Richard for showing up. That's the pod. See you guys next week. 

Richard Cadena: Bye. Bye

Music: “Break Free” by Mike Green