• WARNING: Tube/Valve amplifiers use potentially LETHAL HIGH VOLTAGES.
    Building, troubleshooting and testing of these amplifiers should only be
    performed by someone who is thoroughly familiar with
    the safety precautions around high voltages.

High Voltage delay - relais

Where would you place this HV delay circuit.
After the bridge rectifiers, after the first LC filter stage?

Many thanks
 

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I use a much cheaper solution than that. Two power switches. The first activates the input stage and output filament and bias circuits, the second delivers the output HV.

The fully adjustable delay is how long you wait to throw the second switch!
 
I've used HT or B+ delay in some of my amps for a few reasons, to keep HT from rising above a capacitors working voltage, to reduce inrush current where I've been using big toroids, and over 1000u in the power supply so I can use smaller value fuses, . In both cases a delay circuit switches on a relay, which shunts out a big resistor that is after a fuse in the AC before a bridge rectifier etc.

See attached, there's two circuits I've used, I too am on a low budget & like building my own circuits, a simple RC delay the switches a transistor or delay relay valves, just change the values of the resistors & cap, EG 68k, 150k & 220u. There are online RC time constant calculators on line. The latter is what Tektronix used in their 500 series valve scopes. Lastly I've included an old design which shows where the shunt relay goes. I use bit Omron 3 x DPST all ganged together. Some of the values in this latter schematic are wrong.

Andy.
 

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  • Amperite Delay Relays.pdf
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  • Amp PSU old.jpg
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Last edited:
Your welcome mate. The delay valves are pretty cool though they can be a bit expensive depending on where you are. With delay circuit I usually add a green LED on the front panel. One last thing, the delay resistor needs to be big, EG 20w or more and is in the AC part of the circuit as AC is less taxing on the shunt relay. Less arching on the relay contacts.

Andy.
 
50w should be good, remember though that 50w spec may need a heatsink to get 50w dissipation,but ali clad chassis mount resistors bolted to the chassis should be ok. But to be exact use ohms law. How many volts do you want to drop? EG say you have a HT of 400v & want to drop 100v, your caps draw 500mA at switch on (probably be more) 100 x 0.5 = 50w. As a rule it's best to use higher wattage, but the dropping R is only "active" for about 10 seconds. Test & see.

How big should the R be? It depends on how high your HT/B+ is & how long you want full HT delayed for. Most valve heaters are hot after about 10 seconds, but some valve types have delayed heaters. Also depends on the capacitance of your reservoir caps. As a rough rule of thumb a 1k ish will do, which most folk will say is too big but I've found 10r to 100r doesn't delay full HT much at all. Here's a calculator - http://www.ladyada.net/library/rccalc.html if you put about half HT as the OP V, you should be about right.

The above method & value's are all rough back of the envelope value's, the best method is to try a few value's and measure the HT. I tend to use what I have, wing it, test & alter the circuit if needed.

Andy.
 
Question: for what type of application do you want to use a HT = amp delay circuit? preamp? precious tubes? high voltage?
By that I mean that I don't believe 1 minute has the benefit of a delay circuit except in very specific cases like the one mentioned above.
 
I said in post #8. I've used them in big power amplifiers, for example in a power supply for two 100w monoblocks where the reservoir caps were two 820u caps in series, four 820u caps in all in a CLC filter and a HT of 500v. The mains toroid transformer was 1KVA. In part of the circuit I had caps rated for less than 500v, used as decoupling for the front end, by delaying full HT until the heaters warmed up and the valves started pulling current I could get away with caps not rated for 500v. I could also use protection fuses of the fast blo type. so, for lots of reasons.

For a pre-amp, a delay start isn't needed, as you say. It's depends, for most of the amps I build I wouldn't bother.

Andy.
 
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