[Coco] Powering up our retro systems

[Dave Philipsen]

I’m willing to be corrected if I’m wrong and I will admit if I’m wrong. But there are a lot of things floating around out there that are erroneous. There may be legitimate cases when manually reforming electrolytic capacitors is necessary but I don’t believe our CoCo generally fits into one of those cases. 

If you have a spare CoCo stick it in the closet or the attic or the basement. Avoid temperature extremes but don’t be worried that you need to power it up once a year to reform the capacitors. The next time you power it up if it doesn’t turn on, then start investigating and asking questions. Then consider buying a variac to bring up the voltage gradually to reform the capacitors. My guess is you’ll never need to do that. It will probably be more likely that you have a cap that is fully shorted due to another problem and no amount of reforming would have prevented it or will fix it.

Dave

> On Jan 27, 2020, at 10:23 AM, wrcooke at wrcooke.net wrote:
> 
>    Oh, well.
> 
>