To Cap Or Not To Cap

[ZombieFatMan]

Better

How do you know the cause of failure was due to a capacitor?

well walmart ... lol no everyone can be like you with your FrankenCAP lol if i had to use one, your way is the way

LOL @ frankencap

Here's what I'm getting at: having a cap, even a cheap one won't cause a system to fail. If the cap sucks, it won't do much and you could pretend like it's not there since it's wired in parallel with the rest of the system. If it failed, I don't think it's fair to point the finger at the capacitor. There are lots of other things that can cause it to fail. Just because you were running a cap at the time of failure doesn't mean that's what causes it

if you run hard on the system (drain the cap)

but do not give it a chance to recharge.

Now your electrical is trying to supply the amp/s and the cap . if its a cheap cap with 4awg when you should have 0+ well,

thats when caps make sub-par system go bad when they could have lasted , its not right but it could have saved it to not having a cap.

thats why i say Never use them .r

That's where a lot of people are mistaken.

A capacitor doesn't fully drain, it only drains/charges to the same voltage as everything else. If you are charging at 14v and drop to 12s, the cap will cushion the drop down to 12v, but if you stay there - it won't present any extra load to the vehicle's electrical system. It physically can't - there is no difference in voltage between the cap and the car.

once the load subsides and your voltage increases, this is when the capacitor recharges itself. And recharging the capacitor is no different then having your alt try to run an amp. A load is a load, the alt doesn't "see" if it's a capacitor, amp, lights, etc. It will try and supply the proper power.

Do you know what a farad is? It's 1 amp-second-volt. 1 amp for 2 seconds will drain a 1f cap by 2v. Same with .5 amps for 4 seconds, or 8 amps for .5 seconds. Or if an alt is charging it. 80 amps for 0.0125 seconds. That 1/80th of a second to recharge won't hurt the alt. It's been working up a sweat running full power trying to supply the electrical demand of the amps. The batteries are chipping in too and they need to be recharged. They will take thousands of times the energy to charge back up as the little capacitor would.

So it's not really an additional load of anything. It only stores and releases as needed. It doesn't change the actual electrical demand of the system (determines by amps, lights, stock draw, etc).

I'd bet money that the amp shutting off/getting hella hot is due to the walmart wire, poor gain setting, and (generally) poor install all around. Not because of a dinky 1F cap

voltage drop to i think it was 11.2ish an didn't recover, let off an it did its thing.

but take out the cap, it would dip to 11 but come back to 12+ in-between hard hits (old setup on my buddy steve's Chevy lov)

i know the tech has came a long way, but i will still never recommend a CAP when you could just get a 2nd Batt and or better wire

Seem that we are at an impasse,

You know from experience that your caps work , an work Good

i know from experience that they dont (granted it was a long time ago )

i cant convince you an You cant Me

but i doooo like a good debate

[TaylorFade]

Dude, the cap you're talking about and the caps we use are apples and oranges. I have (2) SPL vehicles running in excess of 10k on caps alone.

Not only is the ESR of each vastly different, the capacity is worlds apart. You put 100A across a traditonal cap with an ESR of .017 ohms, you're going to get 1.7v worth of drop simply due to the resistance of the cap. Triple that amperage and you triple the voltage drop. The ESR of a Maxwell is like .000029ohms.

You're also talking about what? 1 farad? 5 farads, maybe? Yeah... each one of mine is 2,600F. Series'd into banks of (6) to obtain our operating voltages, we lose capacity to 433 farads, but that's still crushing a traditonal "car audio" capacitor.

A bank of (6) of my caps in series is 433 farads with an operating voltage of 15v. That works out to ~ 48,000 Joules. A Joule is a watt second. As in one watt for one second. That means a single bank of my caps can produce 48,000 watts for one second. Or 24,000w for two seconds and so on. And that's just a single bank.

Super Caps are no joke. The cap your buddy had is.

[ChevyBoy95]

Dude, the cap you're talking about and the caps we use are apples and oranges. I have (2) SPL vehicles running in excess of 10k on caps alone.

Not only is the ESR of each vastly different, the capacity is worlds apart. You put 100A across a traditonal cap with an ESR of .017 ohms, you're going to get 1.7v worth of drop simply due to the resistance of the cap. Triple that amperage and you triple the voltage drop. The ESR of a Maxwell is like .000029ohms.

You're also talking about what? 1 farad? 5 farads, maybe? Yeah... each one of mine is 2,600F. Series'd into banks of (6) to obtain our operating voltages, we lose capacity to 433 farads, but that's still crushing a traditonal "car audio" capacitor.

A bank of (6) of my caps in series is 433 farads with an operating voltage of 15v. That works out to ~ 48,000 Joules. A Joule is a watt second. As in one watt for one second. That means a single bank of my caps can produce 48,000 watts for one second. Or 24,000w for two seconds and so on. And that's just a single bank.

Super Caps are no joke. The cap your buddy had is.

[Herokight]

http://www.stevemeadedesigns.com/board/topic/167043-ad-1-amplifier-dyno-answers-question-do-caps-work/

All I have to say about whether they're bad or not.

[ChevyBoy95]

http://www.stevemeadedesigns.com/board/topic/167043-ad-1-amplifier-dyno-answers-question-do-caps-work/

All I have to say about whether they're bad or not.

still, not the same things..... that test is pretty much completely irrelevant to the maxwell super caps.

[Herokight]

http://www.stevemeadedesigns.com/board/topic/167043-ad-1-amplifier-dyno-answers-question-do-caps-work/

All I have to say about whether they're bad or not.

still, not the same things..... that test is pretty much completely irrelevant to the maxwell super caps.

I just meant caps in general. So many people say never use them, but that shows they actually work.

[Dd9515 king]

After i talked to a guy thts been doin this before i was born. I changed my mind on caps i ised to think the same as most dont use them they only hurt u type thinking. He told me they help a lot. They dont replace a battery for anything. Even the big ones like taylorfade has. He said himself they only power for a few seconds. Batterys last a lot longer. Caps help people that have the alts, batts, and wires to have little drop. For example ami (nice job on world record) he has little to no votlage drop. If he added caps to his it would help. For the split second his voltage would drop the caps would use all there power to keep it up. When he doesnt draw that much power they will charge back up.