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Thursday, April 5, 2012

New Tweeters Are Not Always Perfect !!!



Something that disturbed me this week was when I came to know that those new tweeters, just out of the box, are not 100 percent perfect.

Some of them did not passed the assembly plant quality test.

My first solar powered BH was installed with those solar collecting and storing gadgets on Wednesday this week.

I am referring to the Karak Dual entries BH that was constructed from scratch.

I was very excited that the solar system was at site and the supplier was with his two workers to installed them.  I keep my finger crossed that this new thing (to me) will works well with no hiccups.

After the installation works we did a number of test runs.

Before doing the test run the cables connecting those internal and external tweeters were tested with a multimeter.

The reading was positive on two on the cables. Oh oh this is no good said the installer.

It seems that there was some electrical current passing through the positive to the negative lines.

The rule of the game was that if you use piezoelectric tweeters the reading on your multimeter gadget should be zero.

In my case it was way out. It was more than half the meter reading.  Ooch.  No good.

I was a bit disappointed and my mind was that it was the faults of my workers.

I told myself not to jump into any conclusion.  After explaining to my workers I told them to carry out some serious checking.

My worker was very calmed and did a few line checks and to my surprise it was nothing more than a few of those tweeters were causing the crossed circuit.

Two of the affected tweeters were taken down and tested with the multimeter.  It was clearly observed that the meter reading was very high.

"It cannot be because they are brand new taken out from a sealed box." I told my installer.

"Pak Harry there is no 100% perfect and from now on you need to ask your workers to check these tweeters one by one before carrying out the installation." he commented.

What it means was that the wiring inside the piezoelectric tweeters were wrongly done and they were malfunctioning during it's manufacturing.

If I allow to continue running the line without making the necessary tracing and removing them the sound inside my BH will be loud at only those areas before the damaged tweeters.

The rest of the areas will have little or no sound.

Also if you continue running you might burn your amplifiers.

What I can say from this experience are as follows:

1) Try to check those tweeters while they are still in the box.  Open the box and check using those multimeter one by one.  Remove those tweeters that are faulty and do not wait until they are installed. It will be messy and dangerous to climb those step ladders.

2) Have a set of this multimeter while you carry out your tweeter's installation.  Check every line once you have finished with the connection.  If there are any signs of power passing through trace what went wrong.  Remove the faults and make sure your cables are with zero reading.

3) Beside having faulty tweeters there are also the possibilities of cables being wrongly or accidently stapled.  If this happened the cables will show the current flows too. A more difficult things to check. Use a curved staple gun type if you want to be sure that this type of error will be avoided.

4) If you are using a combination of piezo and coiled tweeters your reading might be different.  Yes those coiled tweeters with magnet inside do give a small current flow.

Something that should be considered seriously and I hope you learn from this small experience observed in my BH.

Latest:  After checking every tweeter in a newly delivered box of 250 tweeters there were 6 tweeters that were faulty.  Just make sure you take them for granted.

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