Yea that was us, lol. Insulation behaved more like expanding foam instead of turning into carbon for some unknown reason. We ran like 100A through an unknown length spool of #6 on a Jacobs ladder set up for like 10 min. And the ballast simply self destructed. This after ballasting my coil for a while as well. It was a heavily abused spool for this purpose. There will be another im sure...It did keep the breaker from popping and the variac stack from smoking though. Which is all we really wanted. My 500ft spools of #12 THHN do get warm. But when operating that coil im also doing less than 1min run times spaced out 5-10 min apart. Which is typically duty cycles for most of the coils it seems. So it has never been an issue for me. You could probably get 1 500ft spool and 1 50ft spool and just add a few more turns to get 2.4kva. Or just put the 2 in series and remove turns from one until you get what you want. Still cheap and easy. -Jay------ Original message------From: Daniel Kunkel Date: Sun, Nov 25, 2018 7:37 PMTo: jhowson4@xxxxxxxxxxx;Cc: Subject:Re: [TCML] Good and Cheap Ballast OptionsJay,It's rated for 2kva, however, I will run it at 2.4kva so as to utilize my .06uF Maxwell cap for LTR operation. According to my calculations, I will need 15.5 mH of inductance at 120vac to yield 2.4 kva. However, in time I will probably punch it up to 4kva in conjunction with an ARSG and variable RPM so I can adjust the BPS.Question...do plain spools of THHN get hot when used as ballast? I thought I had seen a post on one of the FB groups about THHN insulation turning into "popcorn"!Thanks,~Dan
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