Talk:3106: Farads

Who wrote this description? It's complete nonsense. A capacitor can't throw a stone. A 1 F capacitor is also not remotely dangerous unless it's charged to a high voltage — except that a 1 F capacitor and a 0.01 F capacitor can be charged to essentially the same maximum voltage!

Unlike other units of measure where a single unit is non-extreme, "The capacitance of the Earth's ionosphere with respect to the ground is calculated to be about 1 F." [1] Most capacitors in practical use are measured in pico, nano, or micro farads. 03:04, 25 June 2025 (UTC)

Please note that the pound, shown in panel 2, is not an SI unit. The corresponding SI unit is the kilogram; an item with a mass of one kilogram is still commonplace. Troy0 (talk) 03:11, 25 June 2025 (UTC)

When my father was a young engineer, the old guys would haze the new kids by asking them to fetch a "one farad capacitor". But everybody in the lab said "Sorry, I ran out, go ask Fred on the top floor", "Go ask Tom in the basement", "Try Peter's Parts on Vine St", etc--- give the kid a run-around. The joke was: at the time, 1F was likely large than a large garbage can and many hundred (non-SI) pounds. But the world changed, and in recent years you can easily buy 1F @ 16V, about the size of a soup can, to smooth car sound power feeds. --PRR (talk) 03:27, 25 June 2025 (UTC)

This explanation would benefit from some elaboration on how and why supercapacitors are dangerous. 195.252.226.234 04:41, 25 June 2025 (UTC)

Funnily enough, the wikipedia page for "Farad" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farad) currently has a 1 farad supercapacitator as the title image. It looks pretty unassuming. Mouse 08:54, 25 June 2025 (UTC)

Top of the page says June 23 even though it looks like this came out on June 25. Should it be changed? 85.76.9.43 05:15, 25 June 2025 (UTC)

I agree with Troy0 that having a non-SI unit in there (1 pound) is incongruous, and it should instead be a sugar crystal weighing 1 gram. 121.98.227.79 06:52, 25 June 2025 (UTC)

"most consumer electronics use at most a nanofarad" -> nah... Several hundreds of microfarads are quite common. But so are tens-of-picofarad, mostly in HF/RF filters etc. Calculating an average over all capacitors in all consumer electronics makes no sense anyway... But I'd say "Most consumer electronics use capacitors in the picofarad to milifarad range".

"To prevent static electricity from building lethal charge, unused supercapacitors are usually stored and transported with a "keeper", a steel or aluminum bar shorting the terminals." -> Static charge won't change the voltage of a 1 F capacitor much... The shorting is for high voltage capacitors that 'recharge' themselves trough dielectric absorption... Interesting, but completely different. -- Gautee (talk) 07:52, 25 June 2025 (UTC)