Aluminum Electrolytics (was: M7891-DC 2a fuse on +12? fixed!)

On Fri, 6 Feb 2004, CRC wrote: [finds reading glasses, Geritol, don't need teeth... lessee here] Waaaallll.... no duh! BUT: I was preaching to the congregation, not the choir. You and I probably can deliver chapter and verse on the care and feeding of fundamental components, their history and evolution, physics, chemistry, mechanics and electronics of them... no doubt. But a lot of folks on the list (most of the folks on the List) are not EEs or MSEs or PhDEs... and we have a very mixed approach to actual 'electronics' - from those who have long careers behind them in design and implementation of electronic circuits and devices - to those to whom electricity is a mystery, an unknown field. So when it is stated in simple language that one can form/reform questionable electrolytics in 'one second' with a Variac (or whatever) - this is exposing people to danger and property to damage, IMHO. That's the point I was trying to make - that there is no 'general case' when bringing up gear with long inop times - and that one cannot prescribe a fixed time span to reform the caps in a (linear) power supply by the Variac method, unless one is aware of the various other points you bring up. And of course you're spot-on in reference to SMPSUs - 'brown' input voltages will often kill 'em dead. And speaking of War Stories: Ever been in the same room with an exploding 1.7F 800VDC storage bank? It's LOUD...... ;} Cheers John