Re: Discharging HV Caps

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

Original poster: "Jim Lux by way of Terry Fritz <twftesla-at-qwest-dot-net>" <jimlux-at-earthlink-dot-net>

>   >>
> I would think the best way to manually discharge the cap would be by using an
> insulated stick of some kind and shorting the spark gap.
> 
> Ed Sonderman

But you don't want to "SHORT" the gap because the peak current is high. Use
a medium value resistor (a few hundred ohms will limit the peak current to
a few tens of amps) and the time constant is still short enough
(milliseconds) that you don't have to worry about residual charge.

The other "gotcha" is that if there are multiple caps in series, shorting
the ends of the string to each other does NOT discharge all the caps in the
string. It just makes the total voltage zero.  Imagine two caps in parallel
charged to 10 kV each.