08-12-2016, 05:04 PM
In general a mains lamp limiter is, at worst, harmless. In many cases it can save a lot of anguish and magic smoke. But there are exceptions as Trevor has noted.
More generally there are some switchmode PSUs that work OK around 110V and 220V but change their operating mode at some voltage in between. Never use a variac on one of these. Not sure what a lamp limiter would do.
If you have the misfortune to be working on some blown up kit which has one of these PSUs then you really want to use a bench PSU to power it for test purposes.
For us vintage enthusiasts we're almost always dealing with pure linear PSUs
More generally there are some switchmode PSUs that work OK around 110V and 220V but change their operating mode at some voltage in between. Never use a variac on one of these. Not sure what a lamp limiter would do.
If you have the misfortune to be working on some blown up kit which has one of these PSUs then you really want to use a bench PSU to power it for test purposes.
For us vintage enthusiasts we're almost always dealing with pure linear PSUs
www.borinsky.co.uk Jeffrey Borinsky www.becg.tv
