Thank you for that response that makes sense now! I have since pulled the core out and rewound the transformer and brought it back to life so she lives on! Lol
Sent from my iPhone
> On Jan 14, 2019, at 3:03 AM, Jan Ohlsson <jan@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> Hi Tyler,
> The growling noise in the clip is from a saturating transformer core.
> Your setup is very destructive to the transformer, a series resonant circuit
> where the JL spark gap is a part of the circuit in series with the
> transformer, ballast and capacitor. There is nothing to remove the energy
> once the resonance is set up, the ballast feeds more energy from the
> electric grid continually into the resonance once started. The energy will
> build up until the core saturates, and then the transformer will go into a
> chaotic ferroresonance state, that is well known among power distribution
> engineers to kill transformers. It kills the transformer either by
> overheating the core, or more prabable in your case, by overvolting the HV
> winding until it flashes over between adjacent turns.
>
> In the usual SGTC setup the tank capacitor is also connected to the
> transformer and forms a potential resonance circuit, but the regular spark
> gap, and hopefully also the safety gap, will remove the energy quickly if a
> resonant condition would occur. In your circuit the JL spark gap can not
> remove the energy, as it is connected in series inside the resonant circuit.
>
>
> The fact that the spark in the JL gap is weak in the latter part of the clip
> shows that the energy goes elswhere, in your case into the saturating core
> losses, and probably also into an internal flashover in the HV winding.
>
> Sorry for your loss, but it was a bad setup. Do not use a capacitor in a JL
> setup, unless there is a safety gap across the transformer HV winding.
>
> Jan
> Stockholm, Sweden
>
> --------------------------------------------------
> Message: 4
> Date: Thu, 10 Jan 2019 15:41:16 -0600
> From: Tyler LaVite <tlavite@xxxxxxxxx>
> To: Tesla Coil Mailing List <tesla@xxxxxxxxxx>
> Subject: Re: [TCML] Pole transformer repair
> Message-ID: <64A6EFD9-7FD0-4734-927F-E1DD3A92C32E@xxxxxxxxx>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8
>
> I forgot I had my camera rolling when my transformer messed up.... two
> things to point out one the arc noise with the cap, two that arc isn?t even
> remotely close to as large as it normally is without the capacitor, and two
> notice the loud pop the last time I turn it on and hear the ballast humming
> loud. That pop would make sense with the one damaged spot I found where the
> paper was burned and blown out on the outer winding. But fixing that did
> nothing.
>
>
> https://youtu.be/O21C4Yf9V2E
>
>
>
>
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