[lazide]

It’s not so much that they are fragile, as they’re a part that gets a lot of very heavy duty use and they’re expensive to make invulnerable. Ain’t no residential customer going to pay for a 100mfd 240v tantalum cap (how big would it be even?).

Think of them like a car starter motor or transmission (for old ICE vehicles).

Assuming we’re talking motor start capacitors anyway. For most of them, every time the compressor starts they see a dead short at 240v for a couple milliseconds, typically in the 10,000+ amps range.

And most people use their AC the most when it’s hot and nasty out. Which doesn’t help.

[halper]

By "mfd", do you mean µF? I have some basic knowledge of electronics and am not familiar with "mfd" in this context but assumed you must mean microfarad.

[lazide]

Apologies, yeah most motor start caps for some reason use mfd to mean micro farads. [https://www.packardonline.com/electrical/capacitor/motor-sta...]

I guess from before the days of Unicode?

µF == the same thing, but tends to be the ‘more correct’ modifier used in electronics and engineering, rather than industrial parts supplier catalogs.

[carlmr]

Oh, wow, this is so bad. m usually means "milli" not "micro". At least they could have used u instead of µ, which is a more common replacement when you don't have the keyboard character available.

[lazide]

Just wait until you see the actual dimensions of a 2x4!

[ssl-3]

I owned a house once that was balloon framed, with 2"x4" black walnut studs in the walls.

They just don't make things like they used to. :)