Reading Resistor Color Codes Fast, Tech Tips Tuesday

hi there and welcome to tech tips Tuesday one of the key things in a speedy troubleshooting procedure is being able to read resistor color codes very quickly and in this episode I'm going to show you how to do just that so let's get started the first thing to do if you haven't done this already is memorize this color code chart this color code chart is pretty much standard for most all electronic components which means that it's not only valid for resistor color codes it's also valid for capacitors and inductors as well you'll also notice that rainbow colored ribbon wire will also follow this coding system so it's very important to memorize this color code system so definitely do take the time to do that you can find this system online if you just type in resistor color code chart under images or resistor color code table under images you'll get this in all sorts of different shapes and sizes and what I want you to do is I just want you to memorize the color and the number I don't want you to go into the multipliers or anything like that because what I'm going to show you in this video is a shortcut that's going to make working out the values of these resistors quite a bit easier so the first resistor that we're going to look at here is this one right here so this resistor here has red violet red and gold on it so whenever you're working out the values on a resistor like this you always work towards the tolerance band and the tolerance band on this one is gold so how you tell the tolerance band on most resistors most standard resistors it's either going to be gold or silver sometimes it will be red and they will space that red band quite a ways away from the rest of the band so you don't get confused at which end to start so we're going to work this way towards the tolerance band and we'll work out this value here and I'll show you the shortcut I'll just grab a piece of paper here and a pen so that resistor that we just looked at was red violet red and gold okay so if we look at the color codes for this we see red is - all right so right - here violet is seven red we know is - and gold is five percent so that just means that when you work out the value of this resistor if you were to measure it it should be within five percent of what this works out to be that's all that this is all right so now this is the first significant figure this is the second significant figure and this is the multiplier right here so the quicker and easier way to work this out is you just keep these two the same so we have two seven and the multiplier we know is red which is two so what we do is we convert that number two into two zeros okay so if this was the number three it would equal three zeros all right if it was a number three this would be orange but it's red so it's number two so we just take those two zeros put them here and we have 2700 ohms at 5% and that's just how easy that is so I'll grab another piece of paper here and we'll take a look at another resistor and I'll give you another example I'll put the paper here all right so here's another resistor we have the gold band at this end so we know that we have to work this way so we've got brown black and yellow and then we have the gold band there so Brown blocking yellow alright so so we have brown black yellow and gold so if we look at the chart here we see that Brown is one we see that black is zero we see that yellow is four and we know that gold from the last time is five percent so what we do is we keep these the same all right so we have one and zero okay and we have a four on this one here which is our multiplier so we turn that into four zeros so we have one zero one two three four one hundred thousand ohms or 100k for short at five percent and that's really just how simple it is so we can do one more here this is an old carbon composition resistor here and the color coding system on this one is blue grey brown and silver okay so so we have blue grey brown and silver so we know that blue is six okay we know gray is eight we know Brown is one and silver is ten percent so that means that this resistor will be within 10 percent of what it's rating is if we were to measure it so again we leave the first end the second significant figure the same so we have six eight and this is one so that would equal 1 0 so 680 ohms and that's again just how simple it is so in order to work out low value resistors so the multiplier band being either gold or silver what we're going to do is we're going to look at this a little bit different again so we're going to look at gold being the multiplier band as over 1 ohm and silver as being under 1 ohm alright so if I take this resistor here this resistor is yellow violet gold gold so gold is the multiplier band on here so if we remember that gold is above 1 ohm that makes working out these resistors really quite simple so gold would be really from one ohm to just under 10 ohms is where gold would go alright and then of course the last gold band is being the tolerance band there again alright so grab a piece of paper here so if we have so this last one was gold this one was gold and remember this was yellow and violet so yellow is for violet is 7 Gold is above 1 ohm alright and this is again 5% so we have this if this is above 1 ohm we have 4.7 ohms so remember that this is above 1 ohm and it will only go to just below 10 so we have four point seven ohms because this is gold alright if this was silver it would be below 1 ohm so I have another resistor here another carbon composition resistor and this one is red violet silver silver okay so grab another piece of paper here so this is silver this is silver and we had red and violet so this is below 1 ohm now so red is 2 right violet is 7 and this is below 1 ohm so we put a decimal place there and we get point to 7 of an ohm and that's how simple it is to work these out using this shortcut today's bonus tip reading Domino style mica capacitors so all these capacitors read in picofarad and in order to read these correctly you have to read in the direction of the writing so we start at this end and work this way this one here has a little arrow on it which shows us the direction to read this capacitor so the first dot stands for either aia or military so if this is a white dot it would mean that this capacitor is CIA or electronic industries alliance but since this is a black dot that means that this is military this is a first significant figure this is the second significant figure and this here is the multiplier so we have 2 0 and if we remember in our resistor color codes the multiplier is 2 so we have 2 zeros here so we have 2 0 0 0 2000 picofarad or point 0 0 2 micro farad this here dot is the tolerance of this capacitor and this dot here is the characteristic of this capacitor now the characteristic for all these capacitors is quite a bit different you need to look at the manufacturers datasheet so this will entail like production line requirements it'll like temperature coefficients and things like that maybe even Q of this capacitor so you need to really look at it and it's really different for most all manufacturers so like if this was a SAN gamma or a mica mold or anything like that these all mean different things so the most important thing to know on these capacitors is these three digits right here this gives you the value so we look at the second one here we know that this is black so that's military again so this is orange white red so we have 3 9 and 0 0 again so 3,900 Pico farad or Oh point zero zero three nine micro farad Gold again for tolerance and brown again for the characteristic dot this is the same manufacturer as well as this one here now you can see on this one here they've only put three dots on this capacitor so this one is relatively easy to read we have green black red so five zero zero zero so 5000 Pico farad or point zero zero five micro farad however you want to look at that on this one here this is a smaller capacitor and we can see the arrow is pointing this way black for military this is violet so seven this is green five and we know that Brown is one so seven five one so if we take that one that equals one zero so 750 Pico farad we have silver as our tolerance and again we have brown as the characteristic dot on this capacitor and that's how you read dominoes style mic capacitors well here we are at the end of another tech tips Tuesday if you found this color code video useful you can let me know by giving me a big thumbs up and hang around there'll be many more topics just like this in the very near future so until that time bye for now you

Channel: Mr Carlson's Lab

Views: 554,704

Keywords: creativedesigncomponents.com, Creative Design Components, Resistor color bands, Mica capacitor color codes, carbon composition, metal film, carbon film

Id: UxMaEyUxlVM

Length: 13min 59sec (839 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 26 2016