SQ Board – power on 24/7?

[BradM]

Someone recently told me it’s bad to turn off the SQ boards regularly. Right now our shutdown procedure is to “Shutdown” the desk through the software menu, then hit the power switch on the back, then turn off the breaker in the room. We have a lot of other equipment to where it’s easiest to just hit the breakers to turn everything else off. We are a church, so the board mostly gets used twice a week for 4 or 5 hours at a time.

Should the SQ be left powered on 24/7? That just seems wrong to me since there is a “Shutdown” feature on the board.

Or is the problem with turning off the breaker even though it’s after the unit is shutdown & powered off?

Thanks!

Brad

[Mike C]

Many installs leave the equipment powered on 24/7, sometimes by design other times they always just forget to turn it off!!

In a case like yours where the system is not going to be used for a couple days at a time I would power it down.

You should think about getting a power sequencing system for the sound system one switch would turn everything on and off in the proper order, you would still need to put the SQ in the shutdown mode before powering the system off with a sequencer.

[Alec]

Someone recently told me it’s bad to turn off the SQ boards regularly.

Some people can be just plain wrong.

From A&H’s spec sheet the max power consumption of the SQ5 is 75w, which is 655kWh per year.

In the UK, at least, the current domestic price cap for electricity is 52 p/kWh, which equates to UKP 340 per year – probably higher on a commercial tarrif. That alone, on both a financial and an environmental basis, should tell you that with your usage the right thing to do is to power the mixer down in between each event.

[BradM]

Thank you both for your input on this!

[Author]

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