Would you please share information about the power consumption of the different PCBs😁👍
- Thread starter highway31
- Start date
iamjackslackof
Well-known member
Which one? There are hundreds...
vigilante398
Authorized Vendor
Yeah it would probably be helpful to at least give estimates for mine, I can start getting those together.Would you please share information about power consumption of the different PCB.
Thanks in advance
My general (conservative) rule of thumb would be to start with 300mA for the high-voltage supply and add 200mA per tube. So something like a Particle Accelerator would be 500mA, Black Eye would be 700mA, Wrecking Ball would be 900mA. The actual numbers are much lower than these, but there needs to be some extra "headroom" in the power supply to allow the tubes' heaters to heat up, then they will settle down to their "stead-state" current draw.
drew.spriggs
Active member
- Heaters: 150ma per tube (~2.5x that on startup)
- Plate current - 8-10x (HV/Rp+Rk)) per tube
- ~3-5ma for the LED
- whatever any FETS/op-amps need
vigilante398
Authorized Vendor
That's incredibly conservative (and based on a 12.6V supply, they will pull less on a 9V supply). Heaters can get warmed up with less margin from operating current, it just takes a little longer.
Since these use an SMPS for the HV supply we're pulling everything from a 9V rail, so this doesn't give much information. The NE555 based supply is not terribly efficient, I believe I measured it around 75-80% a few years ago, but that depends on how many tubes are in there. This means that
Power out = Power in * 1.25,
So if we're pulling 4mA for plates with a 240V rail, that's 960mW, but we're losing about 240mW in efficiency losses, which basically means heat. So in this example we would be pulling a total of 1.2W from the 9V input rail, which means 133mA is being pulled.
It's also important to note that not all 9V power supplies are created equal. I've had some supplies that can pull as much as 125% of their rated current during tube warmup, and I've had others that won't even pull 100% of their rated current before shutting down. So my numbers above are not exact, but they're safe numbers for me to suggest.
Tassieviking
Active member
I bought a digital voltmeter / ammeter from Tayda and put a male and a female 2.1mm DC plug on it, I just place it between my power supply and the pedal I am checking.
The voltmeter-Ammeter cost me a huge $1.59, I was lucky I had plenty of spare DC plugs and sockets or I might have been in trouble.
The voltmeter-Ammeter cost me a huge $1.59, I was lucky I had plenty of spare DC plugs and sockets or I might have been in trouble.
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