5 ms·
Brings back memories of building 'lifters' powered with old CRT monitors as a kid.
by jimmyreilly 5y ago
Brings back memories of building 'lifters' powered with old CRT monitors as a kid.
- muttled 5y agoWith aluminum foil, toothpicks, and a total disregard for safety!
- kragen 5y agoNormally yes, but a normal-sized lifter doesn't require dangerous amounts of current. Normally they lift about a gram per watt, weigh about 5 grams, and run at about 20kV, so they only require about 250 microamps. So at least in theory you could put, say, 20 megohms of resistance in series with your power supply, to limit the current to below a milliamp. You can buy that off the shelf; Digi-Key has a 10-megohm 10kV resistor in stock for 67¢ in quantity 10, (https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/vishay-beyschlag-draloric-bc-components/VR68000001005JAC00/1995209 https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/vishay-beyschlag-...) but it's kind of a specialty product, so if you're getting your HV power supply parts from broken TVs you may not have one. Worse, while measuring the resistance of such a resistor is pretty straightforward in the modern digital multimeter age, measuring its safe breakdown voltage requires destructively testing dozens of them with some kind of characterization of the manufacturing process (so you know that the one your life depends on isn't from a different factory from the ones you've tested). And enough capacitance in parallel with a high-voltage load will make all this moot anyway.