Original poster: "Gerry Reynolds" <gerryreynolds@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> Hi Karl,
Original poster: "Karl L." <karl@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>Thanks John. I have a kill a watt meter, and during initial testing of the primary I found a variac'd firing range of ~150 - 185 VA. No caps or coils were connected, only the xfrmr and gap. Curiously, the PF was 0.26 and it indicated a draw of around 40 watts. The kill a watt doesn't work when the coil is actually firing (too much RF hash on line.) - Karl
Plug the Kill a watt meter directly into your outlet and run an extension cord to the coil located further away. This worked for me for a 1KW coil. I'm not sure if you are using a separate RF ground but if not you may want to try that (outside) to help keep the RF off of the mains. Also, dont coil your extension cord as this allows a larger pickup of RF on the power cord. Lastly, if you still have problems, you may want to use a line filter. My 1KW coil didn't have a filter and things worked OK.
I wouldn't be surprised if Karl's coil is firing 3 or even 4 times per 60Hz half cycle. A resonant value cap can cause the cap to charge very quickly.
Yes, with a 5KV gap and resonant charging, you should be getting around 190 BPS. Measure the "real" power at the wall and estimate the BPS using:
BPS = POWER(wall) / BANG(energy)This will be an upper limit on BPS since there is some losses in the transformer. Some of those losses can be measured if you want to by measuring the primary and secondary resistance, Rp and Rs. You can measure the primary current with your killawatt meter and estimate the secondary current using the turns ratio. The primary resistance may be too low to measure directly so put say a 1 amp DC current source thru the primary and measure the Vdc in mv across the primary. This reading will translate directly to resistance in milli ohms. Now you can calculate the copper losses in the transformer primary and secondary using the I^2R method and subtract these calculations from the wall power. This will get you closer to the power processed at the SG but still not perfect since we have not accounted for the core losses.
It will be interesting to see how close this comes to the 190 BPS prediction based on simulations.
Gerry R.