When to re-condition electrolytics

Noel Chiappa jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu
Sat Feb 7 14:47:03 CST 2015


So, I'm about to bring up an old 11/10, and step a) is going to be getting the
power supply up. So this means probably reconditioning some old electrolytics.
So my question is 'should I _always_ recondition old caps, or is there some
way to tell if they are still OK'?

E.g. if they check out OK on an ohmmeter (no dead shorts), and also on a ESR
meter, does that mean they are good to go? Or should I just always recondition
them?

I ask because this power supply (H750) seems to be a switching supply, and so
I can't use the simple VARIAC hack, I'm going to have to do each capacitor
individually. (For you experienced hardware guys, this is probably No Big
Deal, but I'm mildly terrified... :-)

      Noel


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