 Leaving powered-off things on
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coldcity
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Thu Mar 27 2008, 12:04AM
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Registered Member #1406
Joined: Thu Mar 20 2008, 12:12PM
Location: Deepest darkest Wales, UK
Posts: 27
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Hi all,
I've been working on some small Tesla coil experiments and noticed that whenever I ran my coil, the next time I switched on my bench PSU (not the same PSU as powering the coil) it would pop it's fuse violently (shattered glass) on power-on (loaded or unloaded, didn't make a difference).
I realised the bench PSU was plugged into the same extension as the PSU I use to run my ig-coil-powered TC, so I made sure that the bench PSU was unplugged while the coil was running; same blown fuse behaviour.
After a few days of this (and a lot of fuses) I hesitated before plugging the bench PSU in, and decided to switch the PSU on before plugging the power in. The light flashed as the smoothing caps discharged. Turned PSU off. Plugged PSU in and turned it on - no blown fuse.
This seems to be repeatable in that I can always blow a fuse if I turn the PSU on without first discharging the smoothing caps if I've been running the Tesla coil in the same room.
Now I would think it unlikely that the smoothing caps in my bench PSU are overcharging from ambient RF and that that's blowing the fuse!
I also thought that if anything the fuse would be more likely to blow with discharged smoothing caps than not - isn't there a rush of current to initially charge the caps?
Can anyone explain what's going on here? I'm bewildered.
As an aside - is it good sense to leave things with large smoothing caps turned on when in storage to keep the caps discharged? If so, I'd have thought this would be a common knowledge thing, but I've never heard it.
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