Joule Thief

[TinselKoala]

I have charged my 50F cap on my Earth battery also, however it would not charge beyond what the Earth battery puts out, which is 0.95v.

My cap only charged to 0.951v over about 8 hours, why did it not charge up to the full 2.5v with all those spikes ?

I have a  400F 2.7v cap, I have not tried this as yet !

Probably because there are negative spikes too and you need a diode in series there, to keep the charge on the capacitor. Also, if you are giving your cap spikes that are over its rated voltage, you may be damaging the dielectric and causing the cap to become "leaky". This means that you need to supply more current to offset the leakage, in order to reach a given voltage stored on the capacitor.

Even at the low voltages being discussed here, large caps can be dangerous. They can deliver enough _current_ into a short circuit that metals can melt and even weld together or spall off hot droplets that can hit your eyeballs. Safety glasses are recommended.

[TinselKoala]

Nice machine . More explanations on ultracaps verse battery s .  Actually you cant discharge a large ultra cap "instantly" as demonstrated here . and if you try this with a battery it might explode .  http://www.youtube.com/atch?v=EoWMF3VkI6U  these  actually do have more power compared to batteries with the SAME Volts. we are talking KILO Joules

Do the math again please. 2 AA batteries in series, making three volts, have how many Joules? And a 5200 Farad ultracap at 2.5 volts has how many Joules? Yes, we are talking KILOJoules. The batteries beat the Ultracaps hands down and weigh less and cost less too. If it's energy storage you want, batteries are the way to go. Yes, the capacitor can deliver more INSTANTANEOUS POWER than the battery can, for the reasons you mention. But power is not energy, tra la.

Batteries heat up from internal resistance thus limiting the power it produces and Ultras  well are killers.  I am broke but could not pass up 5200 farads(a pair of 2600farads in parallel) for 35 bucks . they still have plenty . BTW for those wondering what happens when you charge them up over there rated volts  650 f 2.7 volt caps to 3.9 volts  they don't blow up just will eventually shorten the life ..

You really should be careful. It all depends on HOW you charge and discharge the capacitors. I have blown up many capacitors in my time and I've nearly been killed doing it. Do not tell people that capacitors won't blow up, because if you are doing this kind of work, you will eventually blow up a capacitor and you do NOT want to be in the path of the debris or the fire.

The other thing that is not well understood (puzzelment)or recognized is that they take a very high current charger (constant current ) to charge but yet we can charge them with V-Spikes from earthbatteries   or a jt with  very little current faster than the calculations say .

Let's see those calculations and evidence that you can actually beat the correct theoretical numbers. Please.

So by experiments done with them by some of us  it's possible to charge them up with just electrostatic volts with virtually no current similar to experiments done with batteries that appear charged (fluffy charge) except ultras charged this way have the power to back them up and this is not conventional 101 electronics.bet a tesla could charge em up fast .

Albert

I don't see anything unconventional about charging a capacitor with electrostatic "volts". My videos should show you that I am very competent in doing exactly this, and I am happy to deliver as much POWER from electrostatically charged capacitors as you need. "Just volts"..... I laugh.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8fWasxYQZZw
You  might want to check the sphere gap tables and see what kind of voltage is needed to jump a 200 mm gap between spheres. The machine in the above clip can jump 280 mm, nearly the full diameter of the disks (300 mm or so).
If I used larger capacity caps in the stacks there would be so much power in those sparks that they would be truly dangerous to life and equipment. There is only about 1200 picoFarads total capacitance there. You can't do this stuff with batteries.

[kb24]

Hi everyone, is still any circuit that can boost up ampere? I now waiting for my capacitor to arrive to add into my joule thief.. but while waiting, i hope i can have other method to run my fuji circuit with my earth battery which has low ampere

[dasimpson]

Hi everyone, is still any circuit that can boost up ampere? I now waiting for my capacitor to arrive to add into my joule thief.. but while waiting, i hope i can have other method to run my fuji circuit with my earth battery which has low ampere

the best way to get ampage up is run the elecrodes north and south
i mean basicly copper wire a foot under the earth going north and say zinc coated wire south a foot under the earth the longer you can run the wire in each direction the more ampage you wil have

[Pirate88179]

Probably because there are negative spikes too and you need a diode in series there, to keep the charge on the capacitor. Also, if you are giving your cap spikes that are over its rated voltage, you may be damaging the dielectric and causing the cap to become "leaky". This means that you need to supply more current to offset the leakage, in order to reach a given voltage stored on the capacitor.

Even at the low voltages being discussed here, large caps can be dangerous. They can deliver enough _current_ into a short circuit that metals can melt and even weld together or spall off hot droplets that can hit your eyeballs. Safety glasses are recommended.

I agree about the diode suggestion as it would make sense that if the cap has 2.7 volts and the EB has less, you would think the energy would flow back from the cap into the EB.

I think what may have happened in my case is that even though I measure 1.9 vdc out from the EB, and it has all of those very large spikes, it was able to fully charge the b-cap to 2.7 volts pretty fast because maybe my DMM was NOT measuring the vdc output of the EB correctly because it is a pulsed output.

In other words, in reality, if my eb was putting out less than the 2.7 volts the energy would have flowed the other way, and it didn't and I did not use a diode.  This is the only explanation I can think of.  Does this make sense?

Bill