Russell Kent wrote:

Chuck Dunlap wrote:

What waste of power? The resistors do not dissipate much - the originals are just
5 Watts resistors, and I do not think they even dissipate that much. I think the
reasons there have been failures in aircraft is from high engine compartment heat.
The resistors are wire wound and I think the high peak pulse current fatigues the
wire. The 25 watt resistors use a larger diameter wire, not as prone to failure.
My original units are still working fine after 175 hours with cool air blast. I
once flew my Mazda Rv6 with EFI for over one hour with the alternator turned off
(within gliding distance of the airport) and the voltage still did not drop below
12 volts. This was with a standard 33 amp hour battery.

BTW,
If anyone has a failed original resistor, I'd like to have it.  Perhaps I can get my
Failure Analysis lab manager to run an analysis on it to get the definitive reason
that this resistor fails, so we can be confident that replacing it with another
resistor will prevent the failure mode.

Russell Kent

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