I’m making my first CRT Wall for an event in November. I’ve looked at several tutorials and posts but one thing I haven’t seen on these is how not to trip the breaker. I’m worried that I’m going to set up my wall and when the breaker trips I might fry a TV (I have had a TV die on me in a similar fashion, fuse wasn’t tripped it just fried). I’m unaware of how to find out how many Amps my TVs are pulling. I’m unsure how many TV’s I’ll be using as I’m in the early planning stages of this project. If anyone has any advice, best practices, or resources they can share I would be most appreciative!
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there are devices you can buy that test the power consumption of a device. test each tv and you can add them up. then figure out which breaker the outlet is on, and how many amps it has. and check if any other stuff is plugged into the same circuit. finally, i’m not sure why tripping a circuit would fry a TV but to be on the safe side, you could plug them into one or more surge protectors (based on the capacity of the surge protector, one might be enough for all your tvs.) as far as my experience goes, individual CRTs don’t seem to use a lot of power, and i personally haven’t ever tripped a breaker with them, but it definitely depends on the model and i think the industrial ones tend to draw more power for whatever reason
hope that’s helpful, let us know how it goes!
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Thanks! Maybe I just imagined that it would have been a larger issue. That helps a lot.
I had a TV die on me when I hit the off switch on the extension cord while it was still on. Accident, it was late. Nice flat screen too. So I was just being cautious.
…i’d recommend that you - if you can access them - switch on and off the units one-by-one using their respective power-switches - as opposed to having just one main switch to switch them all on or off at once…
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I’ve never heard of a TV dying from losing power (being unplugged, a breaker tripping, etc.), so I feel like the two are unrelated. However, if you have a large number of TVs I do understand wanting to avoid tripping a breaker even just to avoid the inconvenience. As others have suggested, you can get little plug-in power meters with a display to find out how much a TV consumes, and it’s recommended to turn them on one at a time rather than all together to avoid current surges that can trip a breaker (from capacitors, degauss coils, etc.). If a breaker does trip, make sure your TVs won’t turn on on their own once power is reapplied!
Assuming you’re in North America, I would ask the event centre which type of power supply they can provide: a 20A 120V circuit dedicated to the TVs would be useful. If they can give you a split phase (with neutral!) circuit, or more simply multiple circuits on individual breakers, that would also help. If you’re using extension cords make sure to get ones with a proper thick cable