power to the pits
 

A question for all the engineers and off season competitions host out there...

How do you handle providing power to the pit area? We are doing Cal Games in a high school gym, and usually the gyms can't provide that much power, and every time a lot of teams are charging their batteries, it draw too much power, and trip the breaker.

Any idea what we can do to prevent that this year?

Maybe you could run some extension cords from a different wing that isnt on the same set of breakers? This seems as if It could be a big problem. Just when we were running a few too many things off of one powerstrip in our room at school we tripped the breakers fro the entire wing.

Cory

If it is this easy I wouldn't post this question up ;). A lot of times the high school gyms just aren't designed to have 30 teams charging their batteries at the same time. Even if we can run giant extensions from different part of the campus, I am still not sure that will solve the problem.

At this point I just want to hear what other off season competitions are planning to do, or did already, and see if there are any good ideas.

at IRI, last year and what we will be doing again this year is plugging into on of the main "big" circuit breakers. the TechnoKats have a really heavy duty power cable that Cinergy provided thier team to tap into the main power supply. then we ask the teams to bring extension chords to plug into this main cable. We have to have a qualified electrician hook it up because all the power going thorough it.


...not sure if that made too much sense. i wasnt there when they hooked it up and i dont know the exact details of it, but i know thats what they did :]

You would need to get an electrician. You can usually rent a power panel from the electrical contractor that you can feed from. The contractor will need to know the amount of power needed to each pitt area. He can then make sure that he has enough power to keep all happy.

have a battery station like where all teams went and charger there batterys. This could be hooked to a different breaker on its own. Put the battery station as close to the electrial room as possible

Interesting. What exactly is a power panel? I believe I've heard a similar idea from a friend of mine, but not sure if that's the same thing you are talking about. Is it kinda like a transformer? Or a giant battery type of thing we can hook into normal AC power supply and save up the power during the night before?

Think of the breaker box in your house... then multiply it by about 100... that's what he's talking about. It's the central point where all power enters the building from outside.

where would that hook up to tho another breaker?

The rental units I was talking about are like your power panel at home. Coming out of the panel you will find many duplex plugs. Each plug is usually fed from 1 breaker. This gives 15 amps to each dupex plug. You could run 1 team from each side of duplex and should have more than enough power. To be sure you need to calculate the power draw for each pit.

i see. When we where trying to get a invitational at are school, we looked at are power and we found out it would draw alot of power to have each team charging batterys at there own station (forget thee exact number sorry) So are electrician of are school proposed on setting up a charging station on its own breaker right next to the electrical room. so if you cant get the panel you might want to try that

Here is a very bad picture of it I found.

If power in the place is such a problem I would just rent a generator for the day. How expensive could it be?