will i get mad 60hz interference? will i hear a hum all the time out of my speakers? there is no ground on any of the outlets in the room where my AV is going.

is there any safety hazard to plugging my stuff into an outlet without a ground? i will still be using a powerbar.

is there any other solution i could do to ground it myself?

Not sure if anyone is going to be able to answer this one for sure. Here are some thoughts :

1. The ground pin is for safety, so that would also have to be a concern. I assume the rest of the house is like this as well, if not then think hard about getting some grounds in there.

2. The biggest hum problems come from ground loops (ie ground is connected but becomes the source of your problem) not absence of ground.

3. If you don't mind fishing a wire through the wall hooking a ground up is easy (you need 3 prong outlets of course)... I have heard about a few people who ran an external ground wire for one system and it seemed to be OK but ugly.

Bottom line -- most of my equipment has 2 prong power cords anyways so this wouldn't be a big deal for me. Does your equipment mostly have 3 prong ?

I would go ahead and run with the 2 prong outlets but be even more careful than normal about things like spilling liquids into the equipment. I don't think you're going to have a hum problem but if your equipment is designed for 3 prong there is a small safety risk (ie a small chance of something going wrong, but potentially serious if something does go wrong).

that`s true, my amp does have no ground on the plug. But I thought my powerbar or UPS should have one in case of a power surge or soemthing like that? Or is ground unecesary for the safety of the electronics?

What the ground does is protect you from a short inside the equipment which makes the metal case "live". By connecting the case to a ground, if you get an internal short the fuse fries instead of your body.

I believe most surge protectors etc... rely on neutral instead of ground, not 100% sure though.

In reply to:

---

I believe most surge protectors etc... rely on neutral instead of ground, not 100% sure though.

---

They work on MOVS (metal oxide varistors), at low voltage, they're extremely resistive, at high voltage, they're good conductors... jam a few of them between the hot and ground and you get a simple way of shunting excess voltage back through the ground.

Bren R.

Understood, but the ones I have seen either run the MOVs from hot to neutral or both hot/neutral and hot/ground. I don't know what "normal" is though...