Electrolytic Caps [Good or Bad?]

[Steve Conner]

Ooh! This thread is straying well off topic.

I have a few stories related to the eco-criminal thing.

In my neighbourhood, people like to dump their old refrigerators on the kerbside. The council are supposed to collect them for recycling, but usually RG's "copper finders" get to them first. They rip the compressor out to sell for scrap, leaving the rest of the fridge. And letting out all of the lovely ozone-destroying CFCs. Sure, newer fridges use ozone-friendly refrigerants, but people don't throw out newer fridges.

I also know a guy who worked on the commissioning of a plasma incinerator for destroying Halon. Halon is a CFC used in fire extinguishing systems for high-value, high-risk plant like mainframe computers and indoor substations. It's extremely dangerous to the ozone layer, and recently banned just like PCBs. (Ironically, if they hadn't banned PCBs, substations might never have needed Halon systems.)

So, they thought they would have a market for getting rid of it safely. But when it came time to decommission these old fire systems, the Halon all mysteriously disappeared! Wonder where it went?

The incinerator sat idle until the facility went bust.

I personally worked on a system for detecting methane emissions from landfill sites. Methane is a greenhouse gas, and there are legal limits for such things, farting cows notwithstanding. On its first trial, it detected illegal levels of emission, and the landfill site owner's reaction was to boot us off his site.

The trouble with incentives is that somebody has to stump up the cash to fund them. Laws don't cost anything, but enforcing them does. And the Earth can't bill you for its services.

[tedmich]

Originally Posted by Steve Conner

Ooh! This thread is straying well off topic.

I have a few stories related to the eco-criminal thing.

In my neighbourhood, people like to dump their old refrigerators on the kerbside. The council are supposed to collect them for recycling, but usually RG's "copper finders" get to them first. They rip the compressor out to sell for scrap, leaving the rest of the fridge. And letting out all of the lovely ozone-destroying CFCs. Sure, newer fridges use ozone-friendly refrigerants, but people don't throw out newer fridges.

I also know a guy who worked on the commissioning of a plasma incinerator for destroying Halon. Halon is a CFC used in fire extinguishing systems for high-value, high-risk plant like mainframe computers and indoor substations. It's extremely dangerous to the ozone layer, and recently banned just like PCBs. (Ironically, if they hadn't banned PCBs, substations might never have needed Halon systems.)

So, they thought they would have a market for getting rid of it safely. But when it came time to decommission these old fire systems, the Halon all mysteriously disappeared! Wonder where it went?

The incinerator sat idle until the facility went bust.

I personally worked on a system for detecting methane emissions from landfill sites. Methane is a greenhouse gas, and there are legal limits for such things, farting cows notwithstanding. On its first trial, it detected illegal levels of emission, and the landfill site owner's reaction was to boot us off his site.

The trouble with incentives is that somebody has to stump up the cash to fund them. Laws don't cost anything, but enforcing them does. And the Earth can't bill you for its services.

Best phrase I have heard for understanding occurrences in the US (and to a slightly lesser degree our semi socialist neighbor to the north)

"If it doesn't make sense, it must make money"

a corollary for religions

"If it doesn't make sense, it must make babies"


Trivia: Mr. Thomas Midgley Jr invented both freon and tetraethyl lead for gasoline! (and accidentally hung himself with a rope pulley contraption he designed to counteract his polio.)

[guitician]

Hey the metalized poly caps are "Self Healing"! We may be on to something.....
These motor run caps may work.......The AC to DC voltage ratings would need to be figured too.....
http://www.cde.com/catalogs/SF.pdf

It looks like they still use paper too....
http://www.cde.com/catalogs/T.pdf

[Prairie Dawg]

Originally Posted by tedmich

the association of PIO caps with massive PCB pollution is enough for me to completely avoid them. No audio qualities counterbalance their environmental impact, as they are commonly disposed of improperly. Of course the Mfg were the worst offenders, like GE releasing >500 tons into the Hudson River from their two capacitor manufacturing plants at Hudson Falls and Fort Edward, or Westinghouse in Indiana, or who knows what Soviet era factories today...

I've heard grizzled old techs mutter about how they haven't observed any increased cancer rates but that bad karma has to go somewhere...

Some of that stuff got loose in the environment in Michigan during the seventies. It was PBBs (polybrominated biphenyl) but same nasty stuff. Whole lotta bad mojo. The company that made the stuff used the suffix -master for their bagged products. They also made a feed supplement for cattle called Feedmaster-magnesium oxide I think. Well, they also made PCBs in the same size bags called Firemaster. Several bags of PCBs ended up in a feed mill in Climax, Michigan and before it was over the state had had to bury 20 or 30,000 head of cattle up by Kalkaska.

That happened back in the seventies....

The Michigan PBB disaster@Everything2.com

[R.G.]

Originally Posted by tedmich

As a chemist I simply think we should assume new chemicals to be dangerous until proven otherwise and before they become so profitable and entrenched that the companies can do the harsh math of profits vs suffering.

This is another of those things which is susceptible to engineering solutions to social problems. Require the CFO and CEO of any company selling any new chemical product to eat a pound of it unless it's declared to be non-toxic.

We don't use self-interest properly.

is it you RG? have you been lobbying congress? no I didn't think so...

Sadly, no. I can only wish I had enough money to lobby congress.

\This may make you laugh if you haven't already seen it...or even if you have... audiophiles hate scientists/engineers as much as fundamentalists do...perhaps more because they (unfortunately) need them...

Hadn't seen it. Thanks! Now my sides hurt from laughing...

In my neighbourhood, people like to dump their old refrigerators on the kerbside. The council are supposed to collect them for recycling, but usually RG's "copper finders" get to them first. They rip the compressor out to sell for scrap, leaving the rest of the fridge. And letting out all of the lovely ozone-destroying CFCs. Sure, newer fridges use ozone-friendly refrigerants, but people don't throw out newer fridges.

Easy - pay money for the freon. If the "copper finders" make more money as "freon finders", they'll be careful. Of course, our government's approach is to criminalize selling copper. As a result, you now have to >be fingerprinted and photographed< to sell scrap copper and aluminum. But then having dossiers on everyone is a Good Thing if you're an apparatchnik. Didn't the old Soviet Union go broke doing this? Why, oh why must our political heros insist on doing it all over?

The trouble with incentives is that somebody has to stump up the cash to fund them. Laws don't cost anything, but enforcing them does. And the Earth can't bill you for its services.

I used to think that coming up with cash to fund things was an issue with governments. I now know that the USA at least can simply piss away a trillion dollars on "stimulus" which doesn't. A remarkably few *billion* of those dollars would buy a terriffic irregular army of eco-scavengers trying with all their ingenuity to track down and haul in any contaminants they could find.

It would be successful; as such, it will never happen. The financial incentives for hauling in a dead passenger pigeon were much smaller and look what happened to them.

[Steve Conner]

So you're saying that we (leaving aside the question of who "we" are for now) should clean up pollutants by paying bounties on them?

OK, now the question, who's "we" in that sentence and where do they get the money to fund the bounties?

[R.G.]

Originally Posted by Steve Conner

So you're saying that we (leaving aside the question of who "we" are for now) should clean up pollutants by paying bounties on them?

OK, now the question, who's "we" in that sentence and where do they get the money to fund the bounties?

The issue is not should "we" pay for pollutants. It's rather in what currency will we pay for them.

I *did* warn you that this was an engineering solution to a social issue, didn't I?

What I'm saying is that
(1) the ONLY way to remove from the general environment any pollutants that can be accessed is to pay for it to be done, leaving aside how that is to be accomplished. Some pollutants can't be effectively accessed, as in dioxins in sea water at parts per trillion, etc. But freon in old refrigerators can be accessed. *Carbon dioxide*, that uber-pollutant that is killing the planet if you happen to be inside Al Gore's mind, can be accessed; but I'm getting ahead of myself. If we (all of us with hands, brains and, um, noses) are to remove pollutants, it will only get done with some kind of paying for it. Engineering Economics is as dismal as regular economics in that any directed reversal of entropy requires spending energy (which equals money) to get it done.
(2) there is a cost of NOT cleaning it up. Here, there are much more eloquent voices than mine to rhetoricize in loving detail the blood-spatter and misery from leaving these pollutants at large. To use a phrase from the phrase book, "... and think of the children; the little CHILDREN... sob...). We all pay for pollution in our daily lives. We just pay in degraded lives and medical costs, and in other ways. And we pay in terms of prostitute politicians gripping us tighter in the name of "the environment". Since the gaseous products of the digestive system contains methane in humans as well as cattle, I can see a day when a politician will come up with a pay-to-f@rt tax. In this way, ecological damage and law making have become another binary parasite. Neither fixes the other; they both squeeze we the people, the ones who are trying to have a family, do our jobs and obey the law.

So I think it might be useful to look at what we're paying anyway and see if it might not be better in terms of real cost to simply buy up the pollutants. That puts the full force of human ingenuity to work at it. Human ingenuity is not all powerful, and not constant. However, when you give it a proper incentive - like money! - it produces some amazing things. When you squash it, you get nothing but squashing and the delight of those doing the squashing.

It's almost immaterial to ask where we will find the money. We are paying the price anyway, but in terms of medical care and funerals. I personally think that paying in money might be better. And as our political heros in the USA legislature have shown, all you have to do is wave your legislative wand and the money appears, right?

[tedmich]

Originally Posted by R.G.

It's almost immaterial to ask where we will find the money. We are paying the price anyway, but in terms of medical care and funerals. I personally think that paying in money might be better. And as our political heros in the USA legislature have shown, all you have to do is wave your legislative wand and the money appears, right?

All good points, but the only magic money that can be made is destined for the richest among us (Bankers etc.) and the cost of the environmental pollutants are the classic example of diffusion. The concentrated products are sold by the company ($$$) and then abandoned to their (ill informed/lied to) purchasers. They impact the planet and diffuse over huge (shared) areas. The true cost is diffused spatially and temporally and this PLUS the actual monetary cost of cleaning up the mess (if ever actually done) is shouldered by the general populace.

risk and damage: shared socialistically
profit: largely private

science is very good at cause and effect, very much more can be done to guide "putting the genie back in the bottle" and informing the decision to let it out in the first place. This is the way the EPA and FDA should work, IMHO.

[R.G.]

Originally Posted by tedmich

The true cost is diffused spatially and temporally and this PLUS the actual monetary cost of cleaning up the mess (if ever actually done) is shouldered by the general populace.

What most people don't realize is that the "true cost" of everything is always paid by the people who work and generate real, usable goods and services. Everything else, everything, is parasitic. Real production of results does not happen else where. Some level of parasitism is useful, where the parasites lead more to symbiosis, providing a useful result to the host, as in bacteria in the gut providing synthesis of some vitamins, digestion of cellulose for termites and ruminants, protection of the population from violence, as in armies and police, protection from chaos, as in leaders.

When it changes from symbiosis to true parasitism, we (us, the producers of goods and services) have a problem. I keep remembering the phrase - "We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.."

very much more can be done to guide "putting the genie back in the bottle" and informing the decision to let it out in the first place. This is the way the EPA and FDA should work, IMHO.

I very much agree. However, if we put up faery money, it will tempt some of the soulless corporations to do something worthwhile for once, and since they're going to get the money anyway, why not use that for our (we, the people...) good?

[soundmasterg]

Originally Posted by mdxeng

Bad electrolytics can result in major damage to the amplifier - blown power transformer, blown output transformer, worn out tubes, capacitor debris leaked into chassis and circuit boards, etc - if not replaced in time. As they dry out they lose their ability to filter, so AC ripple voltage increasing is a symptom which typically isn't audibly detctable as hum in a push-pull amp (which is what most amps are). However, a lack of bass response is also a symptom of bad electrolytic caps. Recapping old amps is needed if the amp gets used. Some old amps still work OK with the original caps, but this is usually due to a lack of use. If the amp is used often, the filter caps are a candidate for failure.

If the amp isn't used often, then it will often fail before an amp that IS used often. The electrolytic caps need a voltage on them from time to time to keep the electrolyte from drying out....of course the electrolyte does that anyway over time, but applying voltage to electrolytic caps a couple times a year is usually enough to keep them "refreshed."

greg

[gbono]

The subjectivist audio movement, which started in the early 80's, has consistently pandered to the notion that scientific principle and objective confirmation is not necessary to support what "experts" can hear.

Wow someone who's cochlear has a 23 kHz bandwidth - you must be 18 years old and living in the outback in Oz

Finally, from D Self –

“The picture of the ear that emerges from psychoacoustics and related fields is not that of a precision instrument. Its ultimate sensitivity, directional capabilities and dynamic range are far more impressive than its ability to measure small level changes or detect correlated low level signals like harmonics. This is unsurprising; from an evolutionary viewpoint the functions of the ear are to warn of approaching danger (sensitivity and direction-finding being paramount) and for speech. In speech perception the identification of formants (the band of harmonics from vocal-cord pulse excitation, selectively emphasized by vocal tract resonances) and vowel/consonants discriminations, are infinitely more important than any hi-fi parameter. Presumably the whole existence of music as a source of pleasure is an accidental side-effect of our remarkable powers of speech perception: how it acts as a direct route to the emotions remains profoundly mysterious.”

[soundmasterg]

Just a heads up....I've been using my Sprague Tel-Ohmike and a 100k resistor to reform some of these caps. So far so good on every one, though one of the Sprague Atom 20uf 600v jobbers took 9 hours to stabilize. It was newer than the LCR cans I have. The JJ cans which are much newer than the other stuff (maybe 3 yrs old) has a higher leakage level than the others. Guess tubes aren't the only thing they don't make like they used to eh?

Greg

[guitician]

Some e-caps are of the "DRY" type and they will not leak fluid like the others. Those brown caps with the "nipples" in an earlier post are MINIMITE "Dry Electrolytic Capacitor". Those stains on them are from something like wax melting on to them. If the cap can't dry out and is "self healing"(from re-forming)it will have a much greater life.

[Tele-Cat]

Originally Posted by tedmich

"If it doesn't make sense, it must make babies"

If it doesn't make sense, you must acquit!

[Prairie Dawg]

RG sez: "Or we can use waste disposal "companies" that are the commercial arm of organized crime. They have some unusual ideas about how to properly dispose of stuff in general."

Quite true.

I attended a class in prosecuting environmental crime at the NDAA in Columbia SC a number of years ago. It was taught by a guy from the Suffolk County, NY DA's office and much of what the course was about was tracing the load of abandoned waste by the serial numbers and other designators on metal drums etc. Much of what they were concerned with was spent process material from large scale cocaine and methamphetamine production facilities. The pH level makes it defined 'hazardous waste'.

Beware of cut rate hazardous waste haulers, because what they'll do is load the stuff in a trailer, remove anything that can identify it and leave it at the curb in the ghetto or out in the tulies.


Well. All who patronized that hauler are PRPs and the G can and does make them pay.

[Chitownrocker]

However, it is 100% certain that a great deal, perhaps most, of what we perceive of the external world is not directly "sensor data" in the sense of the signals our nerves feed into our brain, but rather a hyper-refined and signal-processed and multichannel integrated based on what the nerves send the brain. The human brain simply makes up the parts of the picture that the nerves don't send. And it will happily fill in not only little holes in the sense of the last few missing pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, but something more like the *entire* picture from one random piece.

Worse yet, the brain tends to make up the picture which has been suggested to it. These things are survival characteristics for humans in the real world, where a twig snapping or grass rustling may enable one of your ancestors to form a picture of a saber-toothed tiger about to spring. That same mechanism, when used for savoring audio, leads to a vulnerability to the lying, cheating, greed of other humans.

Thank You,

For some strange reason life is a little different for me now (lol) Doug