Neon Sign Power Supply: What's the Use?

Thanks to everyone for all the suggestions. I don't know where I'm going to put it, but I might just go grab the thing tonight. Even if I can't use it, I can surely find a good home for it.

Adding the Wikipedia link:

uses.

I grabbed it a few days ago. So far, I haven't plugged it in.

Thanks to everyone for all the help and encouragement.

If its all fiber, why did the phone company have to send out a fleet of service trucks?

When NTL started out they laid fiber just about everywhere, but the street level distribution is co-ax - the fibre infrastructure means you can't obliterate their exchange by shoving a million volts down their co-ax.

You CAN"T "Shove a million volts down their coax". Look up some datasheets on vasrious cables and see just how low some of the voltage ratings are. Fused disk and spiral insulators are the worst, teflon is the best, in the same sizes.

Back in the days of rotary selector telephone exchanges you could cause a fair amount of excitement at the exchange by linking the phone jack to the mains socket - but alas no more!

Do the FO cables have metal jackets to protect agains abrasion and provide strength? If so, you can always melt the metal jackets with a zillion amps. and what's inside will go 'Poof."

Al

People have been connecting weird stuff to telephone lines for about a hundred and twenty years, and the companies are pretty much prepared for this sort of thing.

Telephone systems have always been designed on the assumption that wires will be 'cross-connected,' meaning that someone or something will somehow connect telephone wires to power wires. The insulation of the system is designed for a few hundred volts, which was necessary for some old-fashioned frequency-division multiplexing they were using.

The traditional protection devices are overvoltage protectors, which used to be a carbon-electrode spark gap but are now (I think) gas discharge tubes, plus overcurrent fuses known in telephone company terminology as 'heat coils.' It's the latter that are the major protection against power-line cross-connections, because while the intermittent ninety volts 20 Hz AC that the central office generates to ring your telephone is not vastly different from US power line voltage, steady application of power-line voltage will force considerable current through a telephone receiver for an extended period. The heat coil is calibrated to open after a short time under such conditions.

M Kinsler