Replacement Caps

[bobloblaws]

Cool guys, I get the distinction you are making, thanks for the insight.

[g1]

Enzo is right, there is no way a film cap can go 700% high in capacitance, not even 50%, no physical way surface increases that much or film thickness decreses by the same amount, only way to increase capacitance.
Then how come your meter reads that high?
Ah ... but your meter is not measuring actual capacitance
What they actually do is apply some AC, typically 1kHz squarewave at one end of the cap, load the other end with a suitable value resistor, and measure how much AC do they find at the other side.
Of course, the higher the AC goes through , the higher the capacuitance, and viceversa, so they scale that AC MEASUREMENT by some convenient factor, show it on a screen (or with an analog needle/scale display) and label it as capacitance.
Not a Lab measurement by any means, but good enough for casual Service Tech needs.

Problem is, if cap is very lossy, insulation is degraded, etc., it will pass more current than expected which on a poor capacitance meter (what´s bundled as an extra inside a general purpose multimeter) it will be wrongly read as higher capacitance.

Just wanted to add some data to verify this.
Had a same brand Pinex red cap as in the photo of post #1, value of .005uF
My good ESR meter measured it as .005, but Rp (parallel resistance) was shown as 330K (leaky), good .005 showed over 7Meg for Rp.
On my standard DMM cap function, the leaky .005 was misinterpreted as .015uf.
Still enough to know it's bad in either case, but the DMM did show 'OL' on the resistance range for the bad cap.