A DIY 30-amp 240 volt outlet for your monster amps

A DIY 30-amp 240 volt outlet for your monster amps

Along one’s travels through the universe of audiophilia, one comes across 30 amp 240 volt amplifiers every so often.

But what if you do not have a 240 volt outlet in your listening room?

What to do?

What to do.

Here in the U.S., many homes do have a weird-shaped 240 volt outlet like that seen below.

 

This is the type of outlet that electric dryers use.

It just so happens that in our home, the electric dryer outlet was originally in a small room off of the dining room, which is open to the living room where is our main listening room.

Currently, this small room, formerly the laundry room, is now the ‘closet of boxes’. This is where we store boxes to be used for shipping small things like cables and HRS Nimbus and Couplers.

So what I did was let Neli make a box that effectively converted weird-dryer-outlet to two ‘normal’ 240 volt outlets. [It is just so wonderfully ‘convenient’ to have a wife that just runs off and builds things like this :-)]

Where one end plugs into the dryer outlet…

And the 40 foot power cords to the amps snake across the dining room and into the living room, along the wall finally plugging into the amps.

 

The 40 foot power cables we used are from Kimber.

 

In particular the Kimber Kable PowerKord Model 10 power cords.

 

 

The cool little box that Neli built was an in-wall 4-gang box and a 2-gang cover from Home Depot. Two of the holes in the cover have no matching holes in the chassis.

After spending some time in this section and looking at all the options, it is our considered opinion that our Home Depot just carries a bunch of random parts, the majority of which are either redundant or incompatible with the other parts.

 

 

 

If I remember right, the red 240 volt outlets are hospital-grade which we got from Amazon for about $20

 

 

The other end of these 40 foot power cords is a rather blue socket. These are 30 amp IEC connectors.

 

This is what the inside of the business end of these 30 amp IEC connectors look like. The amps we used this with are just prototypes, and I am not sure if they still use these same sockets in the production models.