 Hey there everybody, welcome back today to Retro Tech. You know I was sitting here in my office area and I was ordering some replacement capacitors to fill my back stock of standardized capacitors that I generally use a lot in CRT repair and this also includes other retro items like audio amps and things the things you see featured on this channel and being repaired and I went to my usual stock website and I noticed that there has been an increase in this stock and the variety of caps that are available right now and when I'm talking specifically about capacitors I'm meeting aluminum electrolytic capacitors and so today I want to take you through and tell you about and a very important characteristic to the capacitors in case you're trying to order something right now. Again we have more choices so I want to make sure that you have the best knowledge that you can to go forward and order the right capacitors for your situation. So let's just switch our views up here real quickly and we'll take a look at a Mauser order sheet here and this is pretty standard on Mauser's website you just go in here and there's a part searcher up here up top. If we start this search over with I'll do this together with you I'm the first thing I type in in the search box is aluminum electrolytic capacitors and I'm going to pull up in a capacitor here to give you an example but just to walk through a little bit on this over here we have our manufacturers what I'm going to search for I'm going to click on a couple things here I'm going to click general purpose electrolytic capacitor here now every capacitor I'm working with in these machines is radial and that's both of those are very standard the other thing I really want to emphasize on filters to put on here when you're looking for a capacitor is to also get on here and check the in stock and make sure you've checked that so you don't pick anything that's not in stock and then the next important characteristic which I actually do not see here for some reason is going to be our temperature rating so right now I find that I get the best results using 105 degree Celsius rated capacitors if possible so let's just start by picking a capacitor now a very common capacitor value for me would be a 220 volt DC and then really any of these from 100 how about 220 25 volt DC 220 microfarad capacitor and then we've picked those things let's hit apply filters and see what we come up with yes so thankfully here we've it's given us the option to add that and we can hit apply filters now let's see what we get back okay so we actually have 26 results here and last time when I went through and tried to you know give some assisting advice on making your own capacitor kits I would do this and we'd only see four or five maybe examples of a good capacitor that we could use but now we have 26 in stock so that's a lot more of a choice and we're going to talk about again the last two important factors here when considering what you should do for your capacitor and it's ripple current and you'll see this rating right over here ripple current sometimes you'll get this ESR rating which is fine too but honestly I've gone through here and looked at a lot of capacitors and you can click on these capacitors and sometimes they won't give you an ESR rating at all for the capacitor but they will usually give you some kind of a ripple current rating now why is the ripple current important the ripple current is important because when you're restoring these old analog devices you're going to need to keep your current clean think about it we're talking about old analog audio and video equipment that is meant to display image or images quickly and then we're also talking about sound so you want to make sure that you're not adding additional interference and that's kind of the way that ripple will work it can add interference and it can add you know it can take actually down on the quality if the ripple current is too high it can prevent you from having clean DC power which most of these old electronics runoff of it'll keep your you know it'll keep your it creates basically a ripple and the more and the more ripple you allow to go through the bigger that ripple can get and the more interference you can end up with so you want you don't have to know the exact ripple current on every item that you work on but you do not want to contribute additional ripple usually to these older analog devices or you're going to end up with you know interference and other troubles so not to get too crazy in this talk here I wanted to make this a little bit quick but again ripple currents are over here so on this one product we have very low ripple currents available at 125 and then it goes all the way up to 760 so you can do that's a pretty wide range now this is milliamps so it's not a huge amount of ripple anyway but if you go through here and you pick capacitors that have high ripple on every single capacitor you will end up adding more ripple adding the ability for your monitor to increase more ripple especially as temperature increases and you know the the monitors working and you're you're just allowing that ripple to get bigger and bigger if you go with the higher ripple current parts now why on earth would anybody just pick a higher ripple current part because the ripple current is directly attached to your life I just did a poll on twitter asking what was the sexier characteristic of an electrolytic capacitor is it the high life hours or is it a low ripple current and it's kind of a trick question because you really want that low ripple current and the high life is more of just a luxury item if you can keep the ripple current down low enough but let's just do an example here I've got some parts pulled up we'll start here with just a couple this is great right here at top up top we've got two different capacitors by the same company chemit the one on top is a 7000 hour rated capacitor the one below it is 2000 hours okay so we can pull let's pull this first one up pull up the data sheet on here and if we look down here yes a lot of this stuff is good again here's our life expectancy 7000 hours and then our ripple current 640 milliamps so this is again on that higher end of that ripple current whereas if we go and let's go back and select the one right under it that is a 2000 hour capacitor look at that 250 milliamps and so that's a much cleaner lower ripple it's less than 50 percent of the other capacitor of course again you are sacrificing that long life expectancy but you're still with these capacitors we're still getting a lot of life out of them honestly most of these that we're looking at even this 2000 hour cap right here has more life in it than the standard one that you're replacing most of the time in a crt from the 90s or the early 2000s and you got to remember that you don't want to just replace the capacitor in it that is you know it's going to already have if it's got a 1000 a 2000 hour limit on the capacitor that you're changing out and it's an 85 degree capacitor for rating when you're changing that if you go up to a higher rating temperature and then increase it to one of these 10,000 hour capacitors you're literally quadrupling to even higher the level of ripple current that you're going to allow in your device and from personal experience working on CRTs everybody I've had where I've tried this myself I tried to go crazy get the highest life highest quality capacitors that I could buy as far as like longevity and it's had terrible results when I actually installed the capacitor kit because of that ripple current ripple flow it just allows a lot of interference and I don't unfortunately have a picture of that or I would show it to you but I can just tell you that from my personal experience ripple current becomes an important part of selection when you're selecting an analog capacitor or a capacitor for an analog device so that's just what I wanted to talk about today I hope this was a little bit clear but again you don't have to know everything in the world about ripple currents and unfortunately I can tell you from experience you're never going to find a ripple current rating well you might rarely in a CRT repair manual but I've done a lot of repairs and I've never seen a you know a desired or specific ripple current listed on the need for the monitor in the service manual so it's something that's just known kind of after you study electronics and how electronics work you kind of understand all this stuff but a lot of us are coming into this hobby with not so much a huge electronics background so there's some of these things that we don't understand don't know and like if you did what I did and you didn't understand that ripple current was a factor you could end up spending a lot of money on these really high end really durable capacitors yet they give you just a terrible result on your end result because of the high ripple that it's allowing to go through and affect both your image or if it's a sound device the sound so just think about that and consider that the next time you make a capacitor order for your CRT or audio amp just remember to look at the ripple current especially now since we got more stock availability and that's just one thing I'm going to also mention is that it is a good time right now it seems to be a really good time to go check on capacitors if you need some because again I've been looking for the last few weeks and months and it's just been kind of a wasteland sometimes where you'd only have one or two options for certain capacitors well it seems to be getting a little bit better thankfully and hopefully it will just continue to get better and as it does it will require us to understand more about what we're doing and what we're replacing with these capacitors when we have more options and that's going to do it for today's episode I thank you for joining me on this special trip into my woodgrain paradise here and just one more thing if you did like the episode please leave a like but also feel free to leave any kind of comment I will preface or well it's actually the end of the video so I can't preface it but it's I will say that my electronics experience is all self-taught all learned from experience and honestly other connections I've made online and other content creators thankfully there's a lot of information out there but it does take a lot of time to self-study my personal background is is an engineering but it's on the construction engineering side so my studies never really had anything to do with electronics in college and that was not a part of my training until after I got out and into the real world and into a job where electronics was a really key part of my career and of course now it is a big part but that's going to do it again sorry to ramble here at the end I hope you guys enjoyed it again leave a comment if you have anything that you'd like to add and I will see you all next time with some more retro content