Invention Release! Carlson LV Capacitor Leakage Tester.

hi there and welcome to another episode of mr. Carlson's lab so over time I've been approached many times about designing and creating some form of an affordable capacitor leakage tester now capacitors have lots and lots of different tests and leakage testing can be considered parallel resistance so we're looking at leakage resistance so you have ESR which is equivalent series resistance this would be looked at as parallel resistance or a resistor placed in parallel across a capacitor just another failure point inside capacitors they have many so the capacitor leakage testers lately have been getting really pricey they've been going three four hundred dollars I find all over the place and this is something with an AI tube in it and something that will source five to six hundred volts in order to test capacitors now whenever I've been asked to design or create one of these things I've kind of just kind of pushed the question off to the side and I really don't deal with it because I'm not comfortable with designing and creating anything that's going to source maybe four or five 600 volts nowadays really we live in low voltage times now and a lot of people really aren't familiar with using high voltages you know like way back in the day when everything pretty much had high voltage in it even televisions had CRTs with you know 21 to sometimes even you know higher thousand volts in them so I've spent a lot of time and I've had have a huge bucket of capacitors and I've just done tons and tons of research and I've come up with a very effective low voltage leakage tester so you don't need to use high voltage to test the capacitors for a leakage it sounds a little bit too good to be true right well I'm gonna give you some demonstrations and show you how effective this is and you know what it'll even find failure points and capacitors that the high voltage testers won't so the low voltage tester will find capacitor leakage where the high voltage testers just don't even see it and I'm going to show you that here shortly so I've spent lots and lots of time developing this circuit and I'm about to release it to everybody so you guys can build these things and it's an extremely affordable device to build you can put one of these things together for probably under 20 bucks if you want to build it in its absolute basic form and that's with the actual bar graph meter on it if you don't want to build it with a bar graph meter and you want to put this thing together on just a terminal tie strip you know like you see in the old point-to-point wired amplifiers you could probably put something together for under five dollars and it's as effective as the heath kits and jackson meters and the old hick hawk meters that test for leakage so this is a very handy device to have on your bench and it will even forecast future failures and I'm going to show you that as well that's a really neat feature of this device it's kind of almost like it has a crystal ball and that's one of the reasons I used the particular lamp that I did on top of it and I'll show you that here quite shortly so anyways enough of my rambling on let's take a look at the device and I'll give you some examples of how well this thing works you're going to be very surprised the two testers that you see on the bench are designed to detect leakage in capacitors these things don't detect any type of a physical leakage or fluid leakage these things are designed to detect internal leakage so basically problems hiding inside the capacitor shell so for example capacitors are supposed to pass AC but they're supposed to block DC so they're not supposed to let any direct current through if a capacitor is passing any direct current these two devices are designed to detect that problem and these two devices do that with extremely high voltage this eath Getae t11 will source up to 600 volts on these two jacks right here so when I click this right now into the leakage position right now there's 600 volts across those two jacks and that's what's used to detect the leakage in these capacitors so you can imagine what would happen if for some reason you came across those test clips on the other side so coming across 600 volts from this machine does not feel good it's very dangerous if you were to have say one hand on one clip and the other hand on the other clip that could be a very fatal situation so when you're using a device like this you have to be extremely careful if you own one of these things and you're not familiar with it I strongly suggest that you read the manual and you don't familiarize yourself with this thing because this thing here will lock in the leakage position so just say you were to shut this thing off leave it and then come back the next day and you forgot that this thing was in the leakage position and there were some probes sitting on your bench say you turn on the master switch to your bench or something like that those probes it would be live and that could be a very very dangerous situation the Jackson 5 91 has a spring-loaded switch you can see that it when I push this it's putting voltage on these jacks right now up to five hundred volts here on these jacks and then when I let go the switch it automatically removes that and it discharges the capacitor much like this when you have to manually return this to the discharge position now as I mentioned in the other video some people like to try to reform capacitors with this particular tester and if you've seen my previous video you know my thoughts on reforming you know in short it's not worth it capacitors are cheap enough nowadays if you try to reform a capacitor and you leave it in a piece of equipment and say you go and get yourself a cup of coffee and come back and you'll find your room full of smoke because they just randomly closed it'll just basically turn into shorts or jumpers so it's really not worth the you know the risk especially if you like the piece of gear that you're working on a lot so you say you're you know repairing an old signal generator or something like that and has a cap in it you've successfully reformed it at any particular point in time it could turn back into its old grouchy self and basically turn into a jumper so you don't want that to happen is a again capacitors are cheap nowadays and you know it's just it's not worth the risk especially if you know there's something you know precious on the other side of it like a power transform or something like that so getting back to the leakage test here you can see that these things are sourcing five you know 600 volts this one will source up to 600 this will source up to 500 volts to test capacitors and people have asked me you know over and over again Paul can you design some form of a cheap tester because these things are going crazy in prices I've seen these things selling up to four or five hundred dollars now for one of these testers with the eye tube in it so that prompted me to design a device that would test the same way these things test but at a much lower and safer voltage and get the same results that's the key get the same results and or better results and that's what I'm always looking for now whenever I design something I will never release something until it's fully tested so basically when I design something I spend a lot of time with it and make sure that what I'm releasing is 100% legit and that's why I'm going to show you how this tester works today and if you're at all interested in building one of these things all the plans and everything the circuit board diagrams you know the circuit board layout the schematic diagrams even the explanation is all on patron it's all right there for you guys if you want to build this thing so basically if you wanted to put the circuit board together everything is sized and scaled you just print off the document and out of your printer comes the layout just that easy so at any rate this tester here this is my prototype right here that's it right there and what I'll do here you can see it has a nice little green glow on the on the front of it as well I get the light out of the way you can see it has a nice little green lamp on the front and that will change and it also has an indicator across the top so as you can see I haven't added any communal writing or anything to the box because this is my very first prototype and it works very well now the circuit board that's inside it you know I've got a bunch of circuit boards and you know because I've spent so much time with this thing and making sure that I've got a solid device here you know the the board inside this thing is not the very first board there have been a bunch of revisions and the revisions that I done are basically sizing and things like that making things all fit so what I'm going to do now is I'm going to show you some comparison tests between capacitors and will use either this capacitor tester or this one whatever one fits in the shot better and what I'll do is I'll give you some comparisons we'll probably use this one here because this tests to higher voltage so this technically is going to be more sensitive to the problem so we're gonna see how this thing absolutely destroys this thing for testing capacitors it's actually kind of embarrassing for the IT 11 how badly this thing destroys this so let's check it out just before I get started testing capacitors with both of these testers I'll briefly go over the functions of this new capacitor tester so first of all this is sitting on this roll of wire just to lift it up so everything remains in focus as you can see this thing is quite a bit smaller than this tester here and it runs off of batteries as well so it's quite a bit safer low voltage across these terminals not 600 so these are both three position switches so there's a few things under each switch basically so this is in the off position now so the unit is off if I click this to the center the unit is now on and the capacitor that would be attached to these two probes would be under discharge so this little yellow LED here will glow as the capacitor is discharging this places the capacitor that's attached to these two probes here under test so capacitor under test capacitor discharge and the entire unit is off all under one switch this switch here selects the type of capacitor so in the upper position like this it's in paper poly or ceramic when it's in the center it's in the mica position or the forcast position I'll explain the forecast here in just a little bit basically what it does is it allows you to tell if the capacitor is going to fail down the road or not this position here is the electrolytic test position so that's basically all the functions of this thing here this will change color when this is green the capacitor has gone through its cycle and that and the test is complete if this is red there's excessive leakage and this is just an indicator of leakage as this goes down we can see the capacitor charging so this is a nice little handy thing to have on the top of the box here so very much setup like this particular tester here just basically with modern stuff so this switch here is doing what this switch is doing this switch here is doing what this switch is doing basically this switch is a combination of the on/off switch and this all at once so a lot of things hiding under this one little switch here so what I'll do is I'll grab some capacitors and let's get testing the first capacitor that I'm going to test is this newer IC capacitor so Illinois capacitor point 1 microfarad 104 yeah that's 630 volts so let's test it on this tester first so put this on the discharge position now as you can see and thread this is indicating a lot of leakage coal dues will wait for the capacitor to charge and this is how fast a newer capacitor should charge on this device at point 1 micro farad so there it is no problems there so I'll just click this on to discharge you'll see a little flicker the LED here that's how quickly it discharges and now we'll go over to this one here so I'll put this capacitor on the test leads here just outside the shot here the device is so big as you can see the needs are attached here then in just a bit okay we'll start off at 3 volts this is in the paper and mica position just like it should be these things out of the way so it doesn't touch me so a leakage and what I'll do is I'll just advance this fast if the eye closes so if the shadow angle changes and stays closed it's a faulty capacitor if the eye you know it can close briefly as it's charging but if it returns to its open position that means that the capacitor is okay so what I'll do is I'll just advance this so when you see it closing like that it's just charging the cap and 600 volts no problems I'll hit discharge and no problems with this capacitor at all so it shows good on both devices here so what I'm gonna do is turn that back down to 3 volts and this is safely discharged I'll just remove this from the clips so let's see let's try this one here so here's another point 1 micro farad different style of capacitor so again I'll attach it to the lead here on the newer tester and again we're in the paper poly and ceramic setting you can also do ceramics on the mica setting because ceramics are such a low leakage style capacitor I'll get into more of this here in just a little bit but basically the upper position is paper and poly and and ceramic can be used for you know paper and oil and things like that as well alright so right now we're on the discharge position so here we go so no problems with that capacitor as well I'll just move that over to the Heathkit checker here it'll be so careful around these little short leads that don't rub up against this that is not pleasant when that's at 600 volts so in the leakage position home problems back down there problems with that capacitor either so I'll go grab a few other capacitors and I'll be right back let's test a famous bumblebee style capacitor audio guys really like these things so this came out of a piece of Hewlett Packard test equipment it had a nice little nylon strap around it with a little stud that stuck out of the bottom then they would screw the stud onto the chassis and hold the capacitor above the chassis in place they really did such a nice job on assembling the HP gear way back in the days you know so meticulous but that doesn't mean that the capacitor is good so this is 104 so this is point 1 micro farad just like the other capacitors and rated at 400 volts so let's test it on the new capacitor tester first so there we go now if you recall the other point 1 micro farad capacitor how fast it moved down the brand new ones and you can see here that already it should probably start moving down and it isn't so you can see that you know this capacitor is very leaky and if this was left on the clips for an extremely long time it may move down a lighter to something like that but as you can see right now it's you know very very leaking there's no movement at all now just because the capacitor is leaky doesn't mean that it isn't charging it will charge you know but self drain very fast and you'll see that this will hold a charge here you'll see this little flash when I click it on to discharge that little flash there so it's indicating that it did charge but it's just excessively leaky there's excessive resistance present within this device so now what I'm going to do is take this and test this same capacitor on this tester here and we'll see how many volts it takes to make this thing indicate that this capacitor is faulty so we'll start off at 3 volts right here I'll make sure that this thing is out of the way so I don't touch it leakage 3 volts 6 10 15 20 5 volts 50 volts 100 volts and now we're at 150 volts and now starting to show excessive leakage now keep in mind that this is just battery voltage across here minutes showing that that capacitor is bad with battery voltage whereas this has to put a hundred and fifty volts across the device now the shadow angle is closed and if you leave this hooked up for a long period of time it may open oh you can see it's actually trying to open now so it may open and it's the same thing with this device here if you leave it attached for an extremely long period of time it'll most likely start to count down just a little bit as you can see this one here but you know how long it took for that to happen it should be instantly open so we would know that this capacitor is faulty but it took 150 volts to show that with this tester whereas this did this and it it's very bad there's an even no movement here whatsoever with battery voltage so what's that telling us we don't need high voltage to indicate leakage I'll go grab another capacitor let's test a brand new point zero one micro farad capacitor and I'll show you the forecast feature on this as well so this is rated at point zero one micro farad 630 volts so 103 K here now watch how quickly the display moves down with a brand new capacitor of this value so there's an example of a really good brand new capacitor now what I'm going to do is I'll leave this hooked up and I'll show you the forecast feature so we'll do the test again and what I'm going to do is click this into the micah or forecast and this should stay green if it goes right again it starts to count back up that would tell me that there still is leakage in there but it would be minor leakage it probably wouldn't be safe to be using in any circuit so as you can see it's staying green no problems with the forecast so what I'll do now is remove this and I'll grab another brand-spanking-new capacitor here this one says argon on it this came right off a card brand-spanking-new point zero one micro farad capacitor at 600 working volts DC so let's test this one put this back into the first position here so again we're on the paper and poly and ceramics setting with this switch here so here we go so you remember how quickly the other one moved down you can see with this one here how it's lingering quite a bit longer so already we kind of have an idea that you know this thing is most likely going to be leaky right so would you say you didn't have that other capacitor to compare this one to and you're thinking oh you know what's counting down maybe it's okay because you know chances are that green LED is gonna come on any moment here and it's gonna appear to be okay so now we want to do is we want a forecast to see whether this capacitor is actually going to be okay to be putting in circuit so we want to know if there is any kind of leakage happening within there that we just can't see so if I click this on to forecast and this goes right again and starts to count back up we know instantly that this capacitor would not be suitable for service as you can see the capacitor is leaking and we wouldn't want to use that so again I'll grab that other capacitor so this is the other brand-new capacitor put this back up here and click on discharge so again I'll just show you this with the forecast that here it'll count down fast see how fast that counts down now I'll instantly click this to forecast and it should stay green you know there is no problems with that capacitor so this is doing way more than this capacitor tester already and if that isn't good enough turns rate up to 600 volts hid leakage this tells us that there's no problems with this capacitor just click this under discharge and show you so you would have missed this faulty component with this tester or as this one shows that it's faulty at low voltage this is 600 volts and it's telling us that this is okay let's test another capacitor let's test some mica capacitors first up is this Sangamo worse and gamo capacitor these are rated for well over a thousand volts so I can pretty much just test this rate at the 600 volt mark well test it on this one first here though it's on the mica position mica and forecast we go and as we can see that's moving pretty fast no problems of that one so move this over to the heath kit and then we'll compare it to the eath kit and that out of the way just turn the rate up to 600 volts no problems I remains open no problems of that capacitor let's try this error box 1445 series you see that there test it on this one here first look at that one move no problems yeah let's test this on the Heathkit tester let's move that out of the way again up to 600 volts leakage no problems again we're on the paper and mica 600 all to return that rate down even though it's on discharge I always like to turn this down first before I handle anything just as an extra precaution and here's another of the same capacitor this is another 1445 series arrow box test it on this one first that is definitely leaky they're all the same value look at that definitely a leaky capacitor there wouldn't want to be using that one in circuit okay let's test it on this one keep in mind that this is testing this with low voltage let's test it on this one up at 600 volts that out of the way paper in mica will move us right up to 600 minutes no problems this would have completely missed that faulty component and the component is definitely faulty because it was removed out of a piece of gear that was very badly affected by it try it again nothing no matter where we move this nothing hit discharged so this one here has seven zero one two written on it I'll just move this down move this back in here so I'll just move this out of the clips so this one here has seven zero one two written on it and as you can see right there into the shot alright so what I'll do is I'll put this back on here let that sit for just a moment cuz sometimes there's a bit of soaking that happens I'll get into that in the future all right let's try this out I'll get that that is one unhappy device so as you can see that's not even moving well it's moving a little bit it'll probably settle off to the same area again probably due to some soaking and again I'll test the same one on this device here he's get that out of the way right up to 600 volts this shows no problems whatsoever let's try it on the Jackson tester as well let's try that Mike a capacitor with the Jackson model 591 so this operates a little bit differently the eye remains closed when the button is out so basically it's in discharge right now if I press the button in you can see the eye opens so it's indicating that it's trying to test if the eye was to remain closed when I press this button there would obviously be excessive leakage just like it says closed shadow indicates excessive leakage rate at the top there so to give you an example we'll say put it 220 volts I wouldn't want to go much higher than that because the next step is 100 volts what I'll do is I'll just short the two leads out here and you'll see that there's excessive leakage the eye doesn't open whereas move these apart again no problems I open so let's test this capacitor this is the faulty mica capacitor with the Jackson just put this here and here set this off to the side like that test it at 500 volts its maximum voltage and here we go no problems this doesn't see the issue as well so I'll just let that sit for just a moment before I put it on this tester here and we'll test this one again with this tester here and as you can see it's definitely faulty so both of the testers missed the issue now I could let this thing sit on this for a very long period of time I have already and it'll only go down to you know maybe three lights for absolute maximum during an extremely long time that's that so again low voltage indicates the leakage high-voltage completely misses it let's test an electrolytic let's test this older can style electrolytic capacitor so there's four capacitors in this can all of those capacitors are rated at 450 volts you can see here that we have 40 20 20 and 10 micro farad this is the legend so you can see we have a half moon beside the 40 so if you go on the bottom here there's the half moon this is the 40 micro farad lug you see we have a square here triangle here and no marking here square here triangle here and no marking here that's how you identify which capacitor is which lug on the bottom of the can so this is on the electrolytic setting here just attach this up black lead goes to the can and we'll attach this to the square click it to test now this is quite a bit more sensitive than the Heathkit i t11 the Heathkit i t11 will indicate a good capacitor at about 15 micro amps of leakage this is a little bit more stingy I've set this down to 5 micro amps so a little bit more picky with capacitors here and that can be adjusted inside you can set it lower down to a micro amp if you like or set up to 15 like the Heathkit i t11 whatever makes you happy this here is a discharge led so see that takes a little bit of time to discharge high brightness LED and that just drains off the capacitor and we could just test all the other sections like that as well so this is handy for all sorts of capacitors let's grab a modder an electrolytic cap here very good capacitor Rubicon lle series highlife very very good capacitors 450 volts 22 micro farad is a rating so let's test this one out really kinda makes great capacitors look at that no problems whatsoever [Music] and that's how this thing tests electrolytic capacitors just that easy so you're working on a piece of equipment and you run across a capacitor says Sprague and it's got yellow writing well from experience we know that Sprite capacitors with yellow writing our paper capacitors and they're very leaky and you work on a piece of equipment you run across a sprite capacitor that's got red writing on it you know that it's a dye film capacitor and you know they are just slightly leaky but you know way way way better than this capacitor at any rate they should both be changed out so then you work on a piece of equipment you come across this thing what is this it's got white writing on it we don't know what type of capacitor this is is it okay to leave in the circuit is it maybe a poly style capacitor we really want to find out so let's use this box to determine what this is without breaking into this capacitor so what I'll do is I'll just attach the leads up right now units off but attach the leads get these out of the way this is on the paper ceramic and poly style capacitor setting those out of the way all right let's see what happens with this capacitor so this is 0.15 microfarad we know how a point 1 micro farad capacitor looks on this tester takes a small amount of time for the capacitor to charge and as we can see the lights are slowly coming down here they're moving at a pretty good rate so you don't move down at a fairly good rate so let's use the forecast position to see if there's any hiding leakage inside this thing beyond this point so this will really tell us whether it's a paper style capacitor or a poly capacitor again if this changes at all while there we see it if it changes at all this is a higher value capacitor so you know the movement is just a little bit slower you can see it's backing up again so there is leakage inside that capacitor as you can see it's climbing back up the scale so that would tell us that this thing is definitely going to fail down the road and we would want this thing out of there look at how fast it's climbing back up so rate that in there we know that this capacitor would have to go even though it went down at a relatively good rate using the forecast we can definitely see that you know it's it's definitely got internal leakage it's resistive it's on a path to decay let's put it that way so click it back up to here and click discharge so let's take a look at another capacitor here let's take a look at this good ol capacitor let's see what happens with this one here I'll just get rid of this one and attach the goodall and here we go let's try this one out let's get this one out of the way this is an older-style capacitor as well we really don't know what's inside this thing this one's a little higher rating than the other ones just point to micro farad positive or negative 10% which is a pretty standard for the capacitors way back then so the other one was 0.15 we saw how long it took for it to start to move this one is point two and it's moving at a fair clip as well so in order to omit some of the delay when this changes from green we'll just do this really quick and we'll see if the color changes and if it doesn't change we know that this is most likely a poly style capacitor and as you can see this capacitor here has very very low internal leakage so I would consider this some form of a poly style capacitor inside or something that they've used back in the day that exhibits extremely low leakage you can see that the scale is not climbing back up again so I would feel comfortable leaving this thing behind in a circuit so the good all capacitor really does stand up to its name in this case here are just a few other examples of some of my creations that I've released up on patreon and there's a whole lot more coming I'm just getting started so this thing is a component tracer so basically a curve and signature tracer with a very low distortion audio signal source so for example say you have a power supply or something that you don't have any schematics for and you want to find the problem on the circuit board this will help you very quickly locate the problems and I give some examples in some videos up on patreon of how to use this device I very quickly find the problem on a circuit board from a drive with this little thing very very useful device this can be used for testing diodes and transistors and it can be used for all sorts of different things so it's a converted older oscilloscope there's a bunch of circuit boards in here all the layouts schematics component Maps everything is all released on patreon there's quite a few people up there building these things right now so this is the capacitor tester that we just looked at all that files for this have been released up there as well as circuit board layouts and things like that as well this is the Carlson super probe a very very sensitive non-contact style probe all the layouts lots of files on this thing all the layouts component maps the circuit board you know schematics everything for the for the main amplifier unit and for the probe head have all been released on patreon this here is the capacitor foil side tester everything has been released on that as well circuit board layouts and everything and there's so much more to come I'm just getting started so definitely come up there and check it out there's lots of great people there everybody's very friendly you'll really enjoy it so I'll put the link just below this video in the description and I'll also put it right at the top of the comments section as well so I'll pin it at the top of the comments section so feel free to click on the link in come on over and check it out thanks for stopping by the lab today hope you enjoyed this demonstration of the capacitor leakage tester I have many more inventions that I'm going to be sharing on patreon here quite shortly lots and lots of files full of them this capacitor leakage tester was somewhat of a recent thing I've been approached so many times about this I figured that I better sit down and try to develop something at least something that would be beneficial especially since the capacitor leakage tester prices have just gone absolutely through the roof I'm also working on some restoration videos for YouTube right here I've got lots of restoration and repair videos coming for vacuum tube and solid-state stuff alike often I get the question Paul how come there's such a delay between your videos well these restorations that I do here take an incredible amount of time to do just the restoration and the videography alone is all time consuming and I'm making videos for here and for patreon and of course I have my regular daily life I have to live as well so I'm a pretty busy fella so as soon as I get them done they're basically into editing and produced and put out just as fast as I can so I appreciate your patience and waiting for these videos as I say I've got some really neat restoration videos coming recently I've purchased some very interesting pieces of test gear probably some things that you've never seen before so I hope you enjoyed this video check out patreon the capacitor tester will be there with all the files and the printed circuit board is ready to be printed off and if you're just into learning about electronics and a different and very effective way head on over there and check it out as well there's lots of people's entries in the community section so you can see what people are adding to the patreon site alright take care bye for now you

Channel: Mr Carlson's Lab

Views: 198,252

Rating: 4.8921423 out of 5

Keywords: Mr Carlson's Lab inventions, Carlson inventions, Carlson capacitor, Carlson tester, IT11 tester, capacitor leakage, tester inventions, test equipment, repair electronics fast, fix electronics, amplifier tester, repair amplifiers, repair tube equipment, repair solid state equipment, learn electronics, understand electricity

Id: LhovRIM5xAo

Length: 43min 2sec (2582 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 25 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/inertialfall]

I wish he would go into a little more detail as to why his low voltage tester does better than the high voltage ones