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Old 27th May 2018, 2:36 pm   #36
MrBungle
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Join Date: Jun 2016
Location: London, UK.
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Default Re: What to replace a RIFA X2 with?

Everything has a design lifetime. Planning that is part of engineering.

The job these capacitors do is a sacrificial one and basically to break down on any transients. The lifetime is a function of the transients.

Arguably this isn’t even a trade off between cost and lifetime. All the plastic replacements are unknown at this point. After 25 years, do we really know what will happen to suntan X2’s? Nope!

What we do is plan for failure rather than attempt entirely to prevent it. Service your equipment every decade and factor that into the cost of maintaining it. Service means replacement much like seals and fluids in a car.

When we own or repair “vintage” gear we’re extending the life of things the manufacturer thought would have been tossed by now.
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