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Re: [TCML] Fried It !




I've wrecked a couple things I can trace directly back to the coil, and some that are oddly coincidental. Let the coiler be warned - I ran into about $2000 of collateral damage, taking into account things that gave up the ghost suddenly when the coiling started.

I run EMF filters on my coil power supply. For my NST coil, I only had one, single phase filter. But for my new coil I use 2 parallel strings of 220V 30A filters. I have not burned up anything since moving to the new pig powered coil with the extreme filtering - and also, it has it's own dedicated 220V 50A circuit. Nothing but my lathe is on that ckt, and I unplug it before running the coil.

The coil ground is an 8' ground rod pounded into the dirt beside the driveway, so the coil is never more than 5-10 feet away from the rod itself when running.

All of this damage happened with my single-phase 120V, 20A based NST coil.

I burned my garage door opener twice. The first time, I could see it happening. The streamers were hitting the gantry holding the opener chain. I had taken to unplugging the opener before running the coil. I even wrapped the power cord through a ferrite toroid. Those things did no good. Controller board - fried. The opener kept throwing a code on power up that indicated any number of 3 things or so were wrong - everything ranging from the motor's burned out to the controller's burned out to the garage has burned down.

Figuring the motor was probably fine (don't know why I presumed that except replacing the motor was the more expensive route) I bought a new controller board and replaced it. The opener worked.

Then I put the coil outside.  No more running in the garage.

Fine. But when the arcs got long enough they reached back into the garage and zapped the opener anyway. I'm figuring the issue was RF in nature, and it probably induced an EMP that killed the front end of the opener radio receiver.

So there went another $150 for another new controller board. Now I run the coil waaay out in the middle of the driveway.

Next, the dishwasher controller board went. The dishwasher would start washing dishes and then decide to keep washing dishes forever. It never cycled through it's modes. Just kept on the wash cycle counting down the time until it got to a certain point, then would start all over. An infinite loop of washing.

My dishwasher is a "Fisher and Paykel" model that has a self-test. I put it into self-test mode and it didn't throw any codes. It had gone insane, and figured the rest of the world was crazy for thinking our dishes were ever clean. It had become the Howard Hughes of dishwashers.

$500 later for a new controller board my dishwasher is working.

Then my oven decided that baking was a bad idea. You could tell it to bake something and set it for, say 350 degrees F. Then, when your back was turned, it would cool itself down to room temperature and pretend it was actually baking. When the timer went off, you'd go and see the thing you put in the oven, hardly influenced by warmth, sitting as you left it, only now an hour older or so.

The wife didn't want to believe it was the controller board (but I did - after all, what is an electric oven but some 50A elements and a controller - and the heating elements weren't busted), and i could have replaced the controller for $400. But the wife wanted a whole new oven, so there went $1500.

Thus, my coil has either directly or indirectly cost me north of $2000 in damage.

Add that to the cost of the coil itself, in parts and labor, and I'd say I've probably spent as much on this thing as a normal person should ever spend in one lifetime on any hobby that doesn't involve airplanes or sailing to Cannes for the film festival.

Joe

On 11/8/2010 11:21 AM, Miles Mauldin wrote:
... I have been worrying about killing one of the
garage door openers, and household electronics and computers, but knock on wood
to date nothing has been affected...
.
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