Show power —
one load calculation, not five separate ones.

A small meeting or single-speaker session can sit on a ballroom’s convenience outlets if the total stays under a few 20A circuits and nothing else important shares them. It is the exception rather than the plan past a modest general session, because those outlets were wired for housekeeping, not a production.

Past that point the job comes off a company switch instead — one feed from the building’s service, then distro out to the show. Exhibit halls publish what they carry this way: Broward’s own first-level halls provide “100AMP 3 Phase service every 30 feet on center,” and Palm Beach County Convention Center’s floor pockets sit on the same 30-foot grid. A tie-in this size is planned in advance, not found on the day.

A lawn, a pool deck, a closed street, a rooftop or a tented site has no service worth the name, so the power arrives on a truck — generator, distro and the tech who runs the numbers. It is sized on the maximum load plus headroom, in a range that runs from 6 kW to 80 kW depending on what the day needs, and it burns closer to the average once the show is running — the difference between sizing a machine and fuelling one.

Not on what is easiest to order. A generator brought in for a space that already has adequate service is a wasted truck roll, and a ballroom’s outlets asked to carry a video-heavy general session are a breaker trip mid-program. The load calculation sets the source.

The signal path a keynote cannot survive losing mid-sentence: the microphone system, the console, the video switcher or processor, and playback. Lose the wash on a side truss for four seconds and nobody in the room can tell you when it happened. Lose the console or the processor for four seconds and the show is visibly, audibly broken in front of everyone watching.

House lighting wash, general power outlets, catering and most staging power tools can tolerate a short drop without the audience noticing or the program stopping — doubling every circuit to the console’s own standard adds cost without adding anything the calculation is meant to protect.

A second, independently fed circuit for the critical chain, proved by pulling the primary in rehearsal and confirming the show keeps running rather than assuming the failover works. Outdoors, where there is no building service to split from, that second feed is a second generator rather than a second circuit off the same machine — a generator failure is not a breaker trip, and a single point of failure upstream defeats the redundancy downstream of it.

On the load sheet, discipline by discipline, before the show — not worked out live once something drops. Which feeds are protected is part of the same calculation as the total load, not a separate conversation added afterward.

Indoors, the space’s own service and any company switch nearby are on the table. Outdoors — a lawn, a deck, a closed street, a rooftop or a tented site — a generator is the plan from the first watt.

Audio, video, lighting, staging, tent HVAC and catering all land on one calculation rather than five separate ones, so what else is on site changes the total even where nothing about the show itself has.

A keynote, a live stream or a segment with no room to re-run decides which few feeds get a protected second path. Not every segment needs one, and naming which ones do is part of the scope.

Where the feed comes from and how far it has to run decide the distro and cable call — the distance to a company switch indoors, or where a generator can sit and how far its feeder has to reach outdoors.

Indoors that mostly affects space and crew availability; outdoors it is also a weather call on a generator sited to keep running through it.