[Christof]

Well the loft is now wired   I have gained much respect for the patience of my fellow sparkies.  Everything is is run for 20A breakers, 12g stranded in conduit, 1800 feet of conduit with bends everywhere!

In the process of wiring this project I started to think about all the hype of botique power cords.  My system will be located about 60ft from my main panel which is run with 12g stranded blah blah.  If I were to attach a 1m botique power cord to the end of this 60ft run could I expect a difference in sound quality vs. if I made my own powercords from the same 12g wire I used in the walls?  I don't mean to be a sceptic but what do botique cords do that justifies the outrageous price tags?  Look cool? Do they somehow take electrons from the junk 'in wall' cord and realign them?  Condition them in some way?  What gives?

[Occam]

Oh..... dimmers. Although some manufacturers supposedly make noise free dimmers, the way to do it is with variacs, which is only practical (due to their larger size) with new (re)construction. If you do a seach on Ebay (variable transformer,variac) you'll usually find a goodly number of NOS small (depending on your va needs) variacs and very low prices. Your 'sparky' would be overjoyed.