Water cooled valve amp - WTF.

[Lindsayt]

But my valve amps sound better when they're hot. Why on earth would I want to cool them?

[Dr Bunsen Honeydew]

That was my thought as well, that is why a valve has a heater circuit. For a start they don't even work until they warm up.

[Ali Tait]

This kind of thing has been around for donkey's years in high power RF transmitters. It's a good way of getting more power without shortening valve life.

[Dr Bunsen Honeydew]

Dirty water is a conductor....
Pure water is a resistor.......
:?

How pure is pure. try pissing on a live cable back stage like a Roadie did at a open air concert if you think water is not a conductor. Luckily this was Stateside so 120v didn't do his sex life much good for a while, if it had been in the UK he would have been dead - no problem.

[Ali Tait]

Distilled water is used in high pressure washers to clean live high voltage equipment. Still makes me shudder every time I see it!

[Dr Bunsen Honeydew]

I bet the guy holding the hose has thick rubber gloves on.

When I lived just outside Leicester in the late 70's we had a 25kv power line a couple of fields over from the house. This was in the early days when people were just beginning to talk about power line health problems. So I did one of the things that were supposed to show the field from the things and went out on a foggy evening and stood underneath them holding up a fluorescent tube, and it fired up pretty brightly

[Lindsayt]

Cool. I'm moving to underneath a National Grid powerline and stocking up on flourescent tubes to cut down on my electricity bills. For evenings when it's not foggy I'll just whip out some Hong Kong power cords to make enough smoke to get the tubes to light up.

[Ali Tait]

:D

[Dr Bunsen Honeydew]

I vaguely remember reading somewhere of someone who did that, but used a big coil in the garden to get induced voltage (like a transformer) from the power lines. But you have to get the correct coil size to get the correct voltage. He bragged about and the local leccy company prosecuted him I think. It seem you don't have to be connected to still be stealing it :?