Re: Protecting Garage Door Opener

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

Original poster: "Gregory Hunter by way of Terry Fritz <twftesla-at-qwest-dot-net>" <ghunter31014-at-yahoo-dot-com>

That's an interesting story. Are you sure the TC
killed your opener? Maybe its time had come and it
would have died anyway. I have a Sears
remote-controlled garage door opener. I've run coils
inside my garage at up to 7500VA from an 11KV pole
transformer without any harm. Even my little coil runs
at 1000-1700VA on at least a weekly basis. The only
precaution I take is to unplug the opener first. I've
forgotten to unplug it a few times and noticed a red
LED on the opener blinking urgently while the coil was
firing. Over two years of coiling activity with no
harm done so far. On the other hand, I've seen more
than one posting on this list about TC damage to
garage door openers, so maybe I'm just lucky.

Greg
http://hot-streamer-dot-com/greg

--- Tesla list <tesla-at-pupman-dot-com> wrote:
> Original poster: "by way of Terry Fritz
> <twftesla-at-qwest-dot-net>" <Zimtesla-at-aol-dot-com>
> 
> Like many Tesla coilers, I run my coils in a garage.
> Early in the game I had
> the misfortune of having the receiving board in the
> opener go dead after
> running my coil (at that time I was using a 12kv x
> 60mA NST). One contributor I
> think in retrospect was that I had wrapped some
> aluminum foil around the power
> unit to act as a shield. Didn't ground it, so
> probably picked up RF rather than
> shielding it. 
> 
> Now I only run a small coil (30mA) with the receiver
> card still in the opener
> (opener unplugged of course). No problems. I haven't
> tried the bigger coil
> (180mA) with the board installed since it costs $80
> to replace and my wife
> isn't too keen on using a push button on the wall to
> run the opener while I get
> the card replaced. 
> 
> So I wonder, what experience is out there on
> protection of door openers? BTW it
> is a Stanley opener, if that makes any difference. 
> 
> Thanks in advance. 
> Jim
> 
>