choosing a bleed resistor

[the great waldo]

Ok cheers Bert

I'll check that out. I had a few jumps years ago with my old Marshall valve amp ,and that was after it was turned off for a week. I became fairly wary of capacitors after that.

Cheers

Andrew

[A_Camera]

Ok cheers Bert

I'll check that out. I had a few jumps years ago with my old Marshall valve amp ,and that was after it was turned off for a week. I became fairly wary of capacitors after that.

Cheers

Andrew

It's a good idea to be careful, but unless you know what is what and why, it is easy to fall for nonsense on YouTube. Valve amplifiers use high voltage in the whole circuit, very far and different from what you will use. Also, if you absolutely must handle the capacitor you can always touch the terminals with a resistor first so that they discharge through the resistor, or measure the voltage across the terminals before touching them. The other thing is that you can add a LED on the DC side which will indicate if there is enough voltage, and act as a bleeding circuit. Just get a LED, connect a 5k resistor in series and that's it. It will be your power on indicator, and your capacitor will be discharged after a few seconds to so low level that you don't need to worry at all.

A slow starter on the primary side is more important than bleeding resistor. The bleeding is fixed by the circuitry which will be connected to the rectifier. The drivers work well as a "bleed resistor", they will quickly discharge your capacitors when you power off, so there is nothing to worry about on the secondary side. Take care of the primary side because toroidal transformers have a large inrush current, even without anything connected to the secondary side, so large transformers should have a slow starter circuit.