Are there any easy universal mods to help stabilise ripple and/or PSU vdroop?

[HaxR3]

For those of us with cheap(er) PSUs :poke: Are there any cheap & easy mods for our PSUs to help stabilise ripple & possibly voltage.

After reading about Custom TEC PSUs I wondered whether caps may help. Am i wrong?

Thanks for any replys to my possibly rather dumb questions!

(Personally I am using a COLOURSit 400W PSU :O)

[Super Nade]

You could try using low ESR caps and larger capacitors on the secondary. Undersized caps are the most common cause of such problems.

[Bbq]

Not really. The solution is a new power supply. Even if you do replace the caps with low ESR and higher capacity caps, you have more to worry about than just that.

[Super Nade]

He wouldn't be asking if he wanted to buy a new unit.:stick:

BTW, there may be cheap mods, but none are very easy if you have not done it before (especially for one averse to using the soldering iron).

[Super Nade]

After reading about Custom TEC PSUs I wondered whether caps may help. Am i wrong?



TEC units can get away with being crap, i.e large ripple. Generally, it's not advisable to reverse bias your TEC's, but with ripple in the range of a few mA's, nothing serious will happen. I've used a crapmax (Raidmax) PSU to power a small TEC ( < 100 W), with no problems. A bigger TEC would probably trip the PSU, but my point is voltage fluctuations < 10% won't be a killer. This is more of an issue with temperature control experiments, where any small change in TEC current will result in a change in temperature. I have been using a Temperature controller accurate to 0.01C for a while now, and I know what a PITA it can be to tweak it.