Help differentiating/identifying capacitor types

[rhomanski]

Re: Help differentiating/identifying capacitor types

105 will give you longer life. Important for me because I am not going to need to replace them again. It's like my cousin told me, a roofer asked him if he wanted 20 year shingles or 25. He said at the time he thought about it," let's see, I'm 78 now, so..." He said "Give me the 20 year." He'll be 83 this year and the shingles are doing fine.

Another thought is what if they come up with some totally different capacitor in the next 10 years and discontinue these old style ones. They may not be physically compatible. These kids today are going to look back on smd's with fondness and tell their grandchildren, "Yeah, we used to cook our circuit boards in the oven, don't need to do that anymore though".

[Khron]

Re: Help differentiating/identifying capacitor types

Well, the thing is, you won't find 85C low-ESR caps On the other hand, there's a reasonably good chance that 105C general-purpose caps might be rated for higher ripple-currents than an 85C same value/voltage one, but you'd have to check datasheets for that

And why might mixing (GOOD) brands be a bad thing?

[thespeakerport]

Re: Help differentiating/identifying capacitor types

Well, the thing is, you won't find 85C low-ESR caps On the other hand, there's a reasonably good chance that 105C general-purpose caps might be rated for higher ripple-currents than an 85C same value/voltage one, but you'd have to check datasheets for that

And why might mixing (GOOD) brands be a bad thing?

I have no hard evidence to back this up, but I would expect that every manufacture does something a little different than the other for a given series of caps. The way they behave in given application should be consistent (IMHO) and I really don't know if this 'behavior' can be guaranteed by mixing different makes/models. Maybe, may be not. Maybe the differences are so negligible that it is a waste of time to even talk about.

[stj]

Re: Help differentiating/identifying capacitor types

mixing wont matter for smoothing power, but if it's for dc blocking in audio each make/series will have a different filtering effect - some will have more bass or treble than others.