What Caps to Stock?

[bwilliams60]

There may be a thread on here somewhere covering this already but I can't seem to find it.
I am about to place a small order from DigiKey and wanted to fill it in with some missing caps.
My question is this. In the electrolytic department, what caps do most of you usually keep on hand? I buy multipacks for small projects and screwing around but what do you keep in the Panasonic/Rubycon etc lines?

[retiredcaps]

Re: What Caps to Stock?

Yes, this question has been covered before on this forum. Type this in your search engine.

common caps stock site:badcaps.net

For me, I can't have enough 1000uF 16V caps. Almost every device I repair uses 1000uF. I get them in 1000uF 25V as well too. I try to standardize on 10x16 mm so it fits in most applications.

470uF 35V in 10x16mm gets used a lot.

10uF, 22uF, and 47uF in 50V are good for startup caps.

Something like Panasonic FR, Pansonic FM, United Chemicon KY brand.

[bwilliams60]

Re: What Caps to Stock?

Once again Retired Caps, I thank you. I put in the keywords in a different order than what you did and got nothing. I guess you just have to know where to look.

[mockingbird]

Re: What Caps to Stock?

It depends on what you repair mostly.

If you're into epairing a lot of LCD TVs, they often use low capacity capacitors, but spec them at a higher than necessary voltage to get the lower ESR and higher ripple capacity. So, where they would only need say a 16V 470uF capacitor, they would use something way higher than 16V, like 35V, to get the better spec of the larger case size.

I couldn't tell you exactly which caps to get for LCD TVs, as I haven't even repaired one of them (though I've done some PC LCDs), but here are some caps to get for computer:

1) All the caps for the usual rails that are always used in PSUs, and in 10mm:
6.3V/10V 1000uF/1500uF (For 3.3V and 5V rail)
16V 1000uF/1500uF/2200uF/3300uF (for 12V rail)

And for low ESR caps, stock a lot of 6.3V 820uF/1000uF in 8x11.5mm/8x15mm. These caps go very, very fast, because they're needed quite often even on modern motherboards. For example, today I preemptively re-capped a brand-new Asus P8B75-M that had something like 11 Toshi Kyogo low ESR equivalents wherever they didn't use polymers.

And also some 16V 470uF Ultra-Low ESR 8x11.5mm caps. Where electrolytics are used, there is always one of these over by the 16X PCIe slot, and it is almost always a KZG.

For Ultra-Low ESR, the only manufacturer still producing them is Suncon (last I heard?).

Finally, you want all the small 5x11mm caps (1uf/2.2uf/4.7uf/10uf/22uf/47uf/100uf)...

[retiredcaps]

Re: What Caps to Stock?

I put in the keywords in a different order than what you did and got nothing.

Like everything, practice helps a lot.

I also try experimenting with different engines and different words.