[Amps] Distilled water in a dummy load ?

Jim Thomson jim.thom at telus.net
Sat Feb 13 12:08:49 EST 2021


Is it possible to use  distilled water in a hb  dummy load ? 
DL  consist of  4 x  200 ohm globars, wired in parallel..in an 8 gallon container.
I welded  4 x 3 inch OD  thick wall Alum pipes together, 2 stacked above 2.
One resistor resides  dead center in each alum pipe.   Each resistor is a 
new  globar  type  SP,  12 inches long  x 1 inch in diameter. 

For the amount of brief testing I do, and sometimes with low duty cycles, sometimes
high  duty cycles,   distilled water just might be  easier to  work with  vs xfmr oil.  

To be used from  160-10m,  no higher freqs. 

What I am worried about is the  dielectric constant of distilled  water.   That appears
to be a lot higher than that of  xfmr  oil.   It could  add a bunch more stray  C  to the mix,
esp with each resistor inside its own  alum pipe..and pipes welded. 

On paper,  distilled water  should be  able to extract heat a lot  better  than xfmr oil.

Jim   VE7RF  


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