ISSUE FOCUS
Powering the Mouse House
A custom, all-in-one unit powers and protects this Mickey Mouse-themed residential theater with three-phase needs. By Lisa Montgomery When a homeowner tells renowned acoustics and home theater design firm, The Erskine Group, they want a state-of-the-art home theater system without budgetary constraints, you know the result will be spectacular. This particular homeowner wanted to update his Mickey Mouse-themed theater, affectionately called “Mouse House.”
that we all know. In some larger homes like this one, utilities are delivering three-phase, 208V power that is normally used for commercial applications,” said Kevin Main, president of Torus Power. “Torus Power is flexible enough to build custom solutions for special cases and environments like these, and that is what we did here.”
He noted that buzzes and hums can come from a variety of issues in a room, and they aren’t the most straightforward problems to track down, troubleshoot, and resolve. The Torus Power toroidal isolation transformer eliminates these issues, saving time and reducing the need for service calls related to “ghosts” in the system.
“The client told me, ‘I want to enjoy this for all it’s worth. I want a bigger screen. I want a bigger, better, faster projector, and bigger, better sound,” said The Erskine Group President and Founder, Dennis Erskine.
The main feed coming into the house is split into three 208V feeds on different phases evenly spaced at 120 degrees around a center neutral. Torus worked with Erskine to specify and design a Torus Power All-in-One unit; its 12.5K AIO 208V is custom-designed to run off one of the 208V phases and deliver an isolated 120V feed to all the equipment powering the theater.
“We don’t want to waste time trying to track down something we might not be able to fix without a Torus Power unit, and we want to leave the room in its finished state without going back for service calls to track down buzzes and hums,” Erskine explained.
While The Erskine Group wasn’t quite tasked with accomplishing the impossible, at times the ingenuity and creativity required came close. The Erskine Group pulled out all stops in what ultimately became a $500,000, reference-grade home theater, featuring classic millwork, custom-designed and milled in-house by the Erskine Group, world-class audio, and Dolby Atmos immersive sound. Tackling Three-Phase Power
Years ago when the theater was first created, the client was skeptical of the cost of a Torus Power toroidal isolation transformer and wondered if it would create any noticeable improvement in the technology experience. But The Erskine Group won’t sign-off on a project without installing Torus Power.
One of the biggest challenges was delivering three-phase current into the house.
“If it’s not a Torus Power unit, we are out of there,” Erskine noted.
“Residential homes don’t typically have threephase current,” Erskine said.
The homeowner’s reticence to spend the extra money on Torus Power could have created an impasse, but instead Erskine urged him to research the effects of toroidal isolation offered by Torus Power isolation transformers.
The power also needed to be clean, stable, and isolated to enable all the reference-grade components in the theater to deliver the ultimate audiovisual experience. There are different types of residential power being delivered now in North America. Many homes use the traditional 240V power delivery
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“The client is a very intelligent engineer, so I gave him the specs, and he started doing his research. When he was done, he was sold,” Erskine recalled.
By reducing the noise floor and putting every piece of audio equipment on the same ground potential, the Torus Power unit eliminates buzz and hum that may come from other appliances in the house. The reference-grade theater’s all-in-one unit is housed in an equipment closet near the back of the theater with the other gear, including multiple audio-video sources and a Crestron CP-3 control system. Since the room was a retrofit project, all equipment upgrades had to be integrated without damaging the existing walls and the custom-designed millwork provided by the Erskine Group. “One of the things we didn’t want to do was tear apart all the work we’d already done,” Erskine said. Installing the larger, 84-inch-by-184-inch Stewart Filmscreen Director’s Choice
