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Interesting mishap

S

Sirje31337

Limp Gawd
Joined
Feb 19, 2002
Messages
293
OK, no flaming. Just enjoy the humor in what I did. I have a cold cathode light on my rig and four fan speed controllers in one of the 3 1/2 bays. I'm only using 2 of the 4 fan controllers. So I was trying to find a use for the other 2. I decided to connect my cold cathode to it, hoping to be able to adjust the brightness of the lights. The connection to the lights was made before the DC to AC converter, i'm not that dumb. So I hooked it up, powered it up. Sizzling, popping, and smoke. So I freak out and shut it off. I don't understand what happened. It smelled like fried resistor though. The fan controller still works, it just won't adjust the speed now. This is the controller i'm using. I hooked it up to the far left channel. The other three are intact, but the fourth won't adjust the fan speed. But it does still power a fan when attached to it.
 
That controller only supports 8 watts per channel, a pair of cold cathodes uses about 18-20 watts. Nice job :)
 
Just be happy that the popping/sizzling didn't happen hours later, when you weren't around the running computer!! :eek: :D
 
DarkMonkey said:
That controller only supports 8 watts per channel, a pair of cold cathodes uses about 18-20 watts.
Click to expand...
Does that mean that if I run a dual cold-cathode inverter off the Zalman MFC1 on a switch control, then it will fry too?
 
Most likely. Get one of the Vantec Nexus controllers. You can get them for about the same price as those and they support 18 watts per channel. You might want to set your lights up with one inverter per light, and give each inverter it's own channel just to be safe, but it *should* be able to handle a pair of them on one channel. I'd get one of the 5.25 ones just because they're spread apart more and a heavy draw wouldn't be that big of a heat problem.
 
Cold cathodes are not incandescent or LED lights and can not be brightness adjusted as such. The charge going to the lamp reacts with a gas inside the tube to produce light. You can not reduce the power and react with the gas less; it just doesn't work like that.
 
I heard that too, but as long as what it's flowing through supports the current, it'd be interesting to see what happens, and it's not like I'm the one paying for it :)
 
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