Capacitors: UF = MFD but what the heck is NF?

Doesn't your head spin with feet, inches, furlongs, bushels, and so forth? To the extent that a probe can crash into Mars?

(I'm waiting to see whether the UK, where I live, starts to reverse its slow reluctant switch to metric measurements when it leaves the EU!)

Mike.

1 mF (millifarad, one thousandth (10?3) of a farad) = 1000 ? F = 1000000 nF 1 ?F (microfarad, one millionth (10?6) of a farad) = 0.000 0 01 F = 1000 nF = 1000000 pF 1 nF (nanofarad, one billionth (10?9) of a farad) = 0.001 ?F = 1000 pF 1 pF (picofarad, one trillionth (10?12) of a farad)

Dan

It's Systeme Internationale (so, blame the French).

n rendered with lowercase 'u', meaning micro, 10^-6. 'n' (has to be lowercase!) for 'nano ', 10^-9. Cannot use the capital M like lowercase, 'MF' would mean mega-farads, and t he 'MFD' would not look like ANY real unit of measurement.

Thought you were old school.

What is the PF stuff ??? For me it was usually uF and uuF for the small stuff and the MFD was for the larger capacitors.

I am not old enough to remember when most all capacitors were called condensers all the time. For me most electronics was capacitors and the condensers were used across the points of gas engines.

I think that NF stuff was (is) an attempt to get numbers to the left of the decimal point. While not exectally,but similar to the scientific notation where you have one number to the left of the decimal point and all the others to the right raised to a power of ten.

In article , snipped-for-privacy@earthlink.net says... were used across the points of gas engines.

Yes, and definitely not rendered with no digit (not even a zero!) before the dot, as in OP's posting. It would be too easy to fail to notice the dot and get the measure very inaccurate!

Compare Fahrenheit, an attempt to avoid any negative temperatures. Soon rendered pointless by better refrigeration and experience of colder climates. There's now an absolute solution!

Mike.

Those PF caps were also known as MMFD or as you said, UUFD (usually in lower case). And yes, electrolytics were usually labelled as MFD, rather than UF. NF was never used back then, I never even heard of it.

However I am finally making sense of it, even though it's sort of annoying having to change stuff that I know all too well. But I did finally figure out that to convert to UF from NF, just move the decimal point 3 places to the left. Thus a 50 nf cap is a .05uf cap. Which in my measurements showed the .05uf cap that I measured as 52.6nf. Pretty darn accurate for a 50 year old paper/wax cap. So, that cap would actually be a 52.6nf.

So, I now see it's not all that hard to convert, but being someone who hates mathematics and has always had trouble with math, it's just more tedious. I did find a few websites that have conversion charts, that show all common caps in UF - NF and PF. I saved the webpage since I am not always able to go online. I was hoping to find it in PDF format, or better yet a converter that could be downloaded and run right on my own computer without having to go online. But at least I have the saved webpage in my Electronics folder, which contains everything from PDF tube manuals, resistor/cap color code charts, common transistor and diode numbers, tube socket pinouts, wire gauge amperages, power conversion charts, and lots more.... In the old days I had books for all this stuff, now I got my desktop computer, and an identical copy of that folder on my laptop computer for portable use.

(Of course I do still have many of the old books too, but the computer is easier to use and takes up less space in my shop).

In article , snipped-for-privacy@earthlink.net says... stuff and the MFD was for the larger capacitors.

I learnt about condensers. I expect those motor engineers had only just stopped calling them Leyden Jars! ;-)

Mike.

Nano is the metric prefix between the familiar micro and pico. I have no idea why it wasn't used much in the US until the last couple of decades or so.

It's a little as if we had grown up using only ohms and megohms and then they started throwing this newfangled "kilo" thing at us. WTF?

Speaking of absolute, there is always degrees Kelvin if you want to avoid negative numbers...

John ;-#)#

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Ah, there speaks an engineer! Adiabatic demagnetization (or population inversion in lasers, for that matter) means physicists have to keep a minus sign handy, even on Kelvin scales.

OK, physicists run into it; everyone else just reads about it.

What is all this nuff and puff stuff? These newfangled condensors should be marked with cm. Bring back pith balls.

NT

a pF is 1 millionth of a uF. A nf is 1 thousandth of a uF. So, .001 uF is

1 nF. 1000 nF is 1 uF.

Jon

I'm surprised you are using pF, I would have thought you'd be using uuF.

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Rick C