how do you tell if capacitor is fully charged?

[31337hxr 10+ year member]

How do you tell if a capacitor is fully charged or not? I have a PowerAmper Xpower 1.0 farad digital LED capacitor and I just installed it onto my car today.

but how do i know if the capacitor is fully charged or about how long does it take for it to charge up / discharge?

thanks!

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[ramos 5,000+ posts]

Not very long. I just usually use a meter to chek the charge.

 

[maylar 10+ year member]

after about one minute you should be fully charged.

 

[chris229 10+ year member]

a couple of milliseconds after you connect the power and ground it will be fully charged.

 

[taylor 10+ year member]

no you don't just hook up the power and ground to a cap....you ground it but you hook up the supplied resistor then the powrer to the resistor and it will charge it....never just hook up a cap with out charging it....it could arc destroying your amps...

 

[jeffrich21 10+ year member]

the easy way to charge a cap is to connect your ground on the cap take a test light connet the clip to your battery pos terminal touch the pos on the cap the light will come on and go out when that happend your cap is charge .(some time the resisiters are bad and cap will not charge).

 

[audiolife 5,000+ posts]

the resistors dont charge the cap they allow it to charge slowly so it wont arc (if it would) when you dont use a resistor...i had a guy hook up his cap then try to charge it lololol i recomend using the resistors but if you dont no huge biggy as long as you didnt zap anything aka unhook your amps or remove their fuses

 

[chris229 10+ year member]

Originally posted by taylor no you don't just hook up the power and ground to a cap....you ground it but you hook up the supplied resistor then the powrer to the resistor and it will charge it....never just hook up a cap with out charging it....it could arc destroying your amps...

Arcing does destroy your AMPs. the arcing is due to the cap not having a charge and has a resistance load of a dead short for a second. What the arcing does do is pits and burns the terminals of the cap. That why poeple don't do it not because it does something to the AMPS.

 

[beastyle 10+ year member]

Always thought the capacitators where ment to accelerate the flow between your battery and your dynamo

Bass comes, dynamo goes wicked and tries to load more, bass gone dynamo goes back to normal... capacitator (as far as i know) should only cover the heavy pulses so the dynamo runs at a more steady rpm

 

[audiolife 5,000+ posts]

you are exactly correct but to the amp not the battery

 

[taylor 10+ year member]

well i have been told that it isn't good to do....but the point is use the resistor..

 

[beastyle 10+ year member]

Ah, thanks.. didnt know that since I havent installed any caps myself //content.invisioncic.com/y282845/emoticons/biggrin.gif.d71a5d36fcbab170f2364c9f2e3946cb.gif

Still wondering if they really give you a value meaning around here a 1farad basic unit costs somewhere around 200 bucks, for that money I can get a nice print, some basics ic's and a huge condensator.

Would that give the same result (assuming the install is right)

peace

 

[audiolife 5,000+ posts]

point is what i was tryin to say is if you already did the bad thing and stuff survived there is no point in going back and using the resistor just for the sake of using it.. always try but if you dont at least unhook the amps before you nuke them lol

 

[chris229 10+ year member]

Originally posted by audiolife point is what i was tryin to say is if you already did the bad thing and stuff survived there is no point in going back and using the resistor just for the sake of using it.. always try but if you dont at least unhook the amps before you nuke them lol

It doesn't do anything to the AMPs what so ever

 

[audiolife 5,000+ posts]

oh then considering that a propper amp line is run being isolated from the other stuff via being hooked to the battery and a fuse is under the hood what would it then effect?