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Re: NEON- Building a loading meter
With some apprehension, I find I must revisit an earlier controversy in
relation to this subject, one which I hope you may recall the outcome of.
As you recall, Dirk and I first tangled, before we became aquainted and
friendly, on the subject of transformer "overload" and what that actually
meant. You recall that I maintained that the overloading that really mattered
most for a transformer was what we ended up calling "voltage overloading",
which meant that you have too much neon footage, for example, on the
transformer, and in order for the transformer to maintain the constant
current in the face of excess resistance, it must raise the voltage to
dangerous levels that cause burnout in the wiring and the transformer. Dirk,
from his lower voltage European transformer rating perspective, felt that
current overloading was the only type of overloading worth considering which
would cause burnout, which we finally concluded was most probable when your
transformer remain below a certain level in voltage, but a much slower
process in any event. The Allanson man seemed to settle the issue with a
report of the frequency of warranty failures in order of causation, with
voltage overloading being the first most frequent cause.
Now the reason I bring all this up in the present context is, if you have a
loading meter and are going strictly by the number of milliamperes to load a
transformer properly, are you not falsely subscribing (at least over here in
the land of 15kV's) to the theory that current overloading _is_ the primary
failure mechanism? Shouldn't we _really_ be looking at the output voltage as
a standard, and -- if we could really do so -- looking at the frequency of
ringing in the circuit, in order to prevent voltage overloading? These two
standards are not necessarily coincident in the outcomes, are they? I don't
think so, because the neon tube has an inverse V-I characteristic, unlike the
simple resistor.
Jeff Golin