Quote from: broli on November 07, 2010, 06:29:59 PM
This isn't the case with mine. In fact I just noticed it works equally well if you short the 2 legs together. Btw I'm using a new 23A 12volt battery.

The pre-charge goes for people who just bought the capacitor, sometimes they don't have any or enough voltage in them so you must "jump start" them.

Yes you can short out the 2 legs to make one lead and it will work fine. I also like to point out to others who don't fully understand why this is important. Normally when you have a LED in series with a capacitor it get dim fast because the capacitor is filling up and once full the LED shuts off. With the captret the LED will continue to glow and give unique results.

There is multiple ways to hook the captret up, i've even made some that ran like what my diagram says and at the - to the top lead i put a diode in series with a AA and it would charge the AA while running the LED.

Just be careful when using 12 volt battery. I used a 12 volt once and some wire accidently touched and blue smoke formed from what use to be the wire. Just remember, voltage matters not amps.

Hello,

@broli : it is not picking up radio-waves, if what ippointelss2 said is true about operation at 20 V then it may oscillating itself , a rc-oscillation. I would no be surprised if it oscillates like a joule-thieve

Does anyone who has made it work have a scope ?

Regards

Kator01

Truly amazing!

The captret might be AC by nature!
top of cap to + = 37.6 VAC
top of cap to - = 33.7 VAC
Across LED = 3.2 VAC

The battery voltage is only 17.39, how can it be higher and AC? Just amazing!

Over at energetic forum one person has hooked it to a scope and said it gets 50 hertz, but his house runs on 60 hertz so its not coming from the house power. And one guy has a joule thief running off of it @ only 4ma!

http://www.energeticforum.com/renewable-energy/6684-captret-perpetual-light-dead-batteries.html#post115445

Open sourcing the Captret has open many new things!

Hello, this is my current results (i can't wait more!)

I used 9V Battery from my multimeter (used)

Initial voltage: 7.77 off-load
Capacitor: Electrolitic 2.2uF - 65V

0 min - 7.68V on load and LED Full Bright
3 min - 8.03V on load and LED Full Bright
6 min - 8.18V on load and LED Full Bright
24 min - 8.28V on ...
31 min - 8.30V on ...
35 min - 8.31V on ...
55 min - 8.35V on ...

First proof is ok, battery is recharging, to be continued...

I just tried this circuit with a 47uf 250 volt cap and 2 x 9 volt batteries.  The batteries were not new but close to 9.0 volts.  However I did one thing different as I hate seeing people get excited about lighting a 5mm LED.  As it is I've got a flashlight that will run over a year which uses a 9 volt battery and a 5mm LED.  That's running non-stop over a year.  Most 5mm LED's are very low power diodes which consume very little for the effect they give which is a fairly dim amount of light. 

  So I dug out one of my orignal Luxeon high power LED's.  Not high power by the bleeding edge LED's but the power is rated at 1 watt and at that power it consume about 350 ma IIRC and normally are mounted on a heat sink. 
     I was amazed.   I hooked up the circuit and was surprised at how bright this LED was.  I know it's not running full tilt but it was bright enough to not want to stare at it.  Using a Fluke 87 meter I measured the voltage across the 2 batteries in series after it had been hooked up maybe 15 seconds.  It read 18.10 volts.  After about 30 seconds I checked again and it was 18.19 volts.  A minute or two later it was at 18.22 volts.  About 10 minutes it seems to have leveled off a bit at 18.23 volts.  Interesting. 
   I could not see any AC voltage other than millivolt range which was about the same as background AC when the leads are just hanging in the air.