REG/REC units

[San Francisco RC45]

This was an interesting and informative read, and brought me back to the days when I was Corporate Product Safety manager for a large electronics company with a fruit name. Besides designing product safety into their products, I also performed numerous field investigations into product safety related issues, and the root cause of some of the problems were exactly the same as described here with the regulator (connector).

Connectors (male and female) have a very thin coating of ‘exotic’ materials like gold or silver - great electrical conducting materials and soft. When the connectors are mated, they ‘dig’ into each other and form a seal around the connection in the areas where they physically contact each other. This protects the electrical contact area from environmental challenges, commonly seen as oxidation.
The system works very well but there are some considerations to understand 1) there is a limit on the number on insertions & withdrawals you can do - typically around 10 cycles for connectors that don’t get used a lot like the regulator and 2) no mechanical vibration as this will also wear down the soft coating 3) power handling.

So what happens if the soft contact materials wears, well the impedance (resistance) between the two connections increases. As impedance increases, so does the power being dumped into the small contact area. As time goes on, pitting of the contacts will happen resulting in really small amounts of arcing which leaves carbon deposits behind (carbon is a conductor, with impedance). And the whole cycle starts again, until it burns itself out or you remove power.

Speaking of power, this is a significant factor in the equation. More power = higher likelihood of this phenomenon happening and more power (energy) getting dumped into the fault area. So besides the obvious solution of “Change the connector to a higher quality one�, there’s also the opportunity to reduce the power, significantly.

I’ve converted, almost my entire bike, to LED technology and have produced a table detailing the power saving that can be achieved by this conversion. My analysis shows you can readily achieve over 77% power reduction which will absolutely help with this issue. While there are different manufacturer’s of LEDs which will increase/decrease the numbers, I would expect this kinda of saving no matter what LED you install.

While you contemplate replacing your regulator, you should also consider converting to LED - your future will be much brighter �

Kinda a little long-winded, but I hope you find this interesting, Andrew

Link to Table : https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ut6WlG ... sp=sharing