Installation : Parit Buntar Budget Hotel

Don’t know what’s the name Budget Hotel

When I first heard it was a budget hotel, what first came to my mind was something smaller than the Tune Hotel. But I was wrong. So wrong. This new budget hotel in Parit Buntar, Perak is one big building with nice rooms! This 3 storeys building consist of shop lots at the bottom, a shopping market at the first floor and two floors of more than 80 hotel rooms.

One of the room

So I was there, with my dad, to install Public Address (P.A) system for the entire building, CCTV, MATV (Master Antenna Television), telephone system for all the rooms.

Of course we can’t finish it all in one day. It was a almost two hours drive to get there.

When we first got there, all the cables are a mess (as usual) ! The colourful cables you see, are all the ceiling speakers cable coming from all the storeys and back to this control room. The black cables are for the CCTV and MATV. The first thing we do is to sort the cables out. Anyone with basic electronics knowledge should know that you can’t just “simply connect” everything together. For example, every ceiling speakers is connected with two wire, one which is COM (usually black) and 100V (usually red/light color). The COM is like a shield, and the 100V is the “hot” signal which carries the signal.

So each speaker have their own pair (which is a COM, and a 100V, or hot) and those two must be together. Luckily this wiring man did pair them together, else we’ll have a hard time choosing them out! How to choose them out you ask? Well that consume alot of time, or should I say, luck? It’s trial and error, you take this line and the other one and hear if any of the speaker work. Easy as it seems, but here we’re working in a 3 storey (sometimes even more) building and to trace one ceiling speaker, it’s not easy….

Luckily in this case, we don’t have to trace them but we just need to know where does all the lines go to.

We then lay the cable in the conduit where they will then cover it up. As I say, the building have 3 storey and so we’ll usually divide them into different zones, so that a certain announcement/music can only go to a certain zone.

For that, we’ll need a device called the “Zone Selector” Zone selector basically takes the output power from the power amp, and then distribute them to other zones.

In this case, we have a Pre-Amp (like a mixer), a CD Player, microphone, zone selector, 2 power amps, and a battery charger with battery (big batteries I’m talking about) in case if there’s no electricity, the system can run.

The CD player and microphone are patched into the pre amp, and the output of the pre amp goes to the amp. The first amp then loop the signal output to the other amp. And then, both amp’s speakers output are connected to the Zone Selector’s input. Zone Selector’s output then patched to all the different speaker in different zones.

A battery back up? Easy, just hook up all the devices to the battery charger and when there’s no electricity, it will switch to battery power automatically.

I not sure if it might sounds complicated to you, but that’s the most basic system connection in terms of installation.

So there’s how I divide all the zones. Actually it depends on how the wire goes – it depends on how they wire up all the speakers. TO create every single different zones, you need to wire all the speakers separately, where every different zones need to have different wire coming back to the control room, instead of just looping all of the ceiling speakers. Perhaps a diagram would be good to explain all this.. but I’m lazy to draw a diagram….

Usually the process will be very fast, as all the device is pre-installed to the rack before we send them to the venue. The one that takes time probably would be tracing where the wires go and how they wire the whole building. We’re lucky to get a wireman who actually knows what they are doing this time, so that save up alot of time !

That’s probably the simplest connection ever.. I hope I’ll get to do more complicated installation soon. COm’onn I need more challenge !!