Re: Triggered gap and safety gaps

["Tesla list" <tesla-at-pupman-dot-com>]

Original poster: "Ed Phillips by way of Terry Fritz <twftesla-at-qwest-dot-net>" <evp-at-pacbell-dot-net>

Tesla list wrote:
> 
> Original poster: "Terry Fritz" <twftesla-at-qwest-dot-net>
> 
> Hi,
> 
> At our local Tesla meeting yesterday, we tried this dimmer, capacitor, and
> coil circuit (I never have before).  I had a MOV across the AC Line but it
> all really seemed very tame.  We made a nice little Jacob's ladder with it.
>  The ignition coil seemed to heat up pretty quickly with 10 and 20 uF so
> maybe there is some work to be done there.  I need to get the Pearson 411
> and the Tek5100 on the AC line to see what kind of messyness is really
> going on, but I was surprised that it seemed to work so smoothly.  MOVs and
> a good line filter should catch anything in any case.  I would, however,
> worry if the primary cap were to decide to discharge backward into the
> thing.  Having 5 Joules track backwards through the coil and dimmer may be
> nasty, but one should be able to stop it from getting out on the AC line
> fairly easily.  More testing needs to be done.   Working on it ;-))
> 
> Cheers,
> 
>         Terry



Terry:

	Have you looked at the peak line current when you are running the
dimmer?  I have and it can be as much as 20 amps with a 6 ufd
capacitor.  Also, 10 to 20 ufd seems like an awfully high capacitance
and not surprised it makes things get hot.

Ed