Low Power Electric Pet Deterrent does not work

[turgut kalfaoglu]

Hello everyone; my first posting, I hope this is appropriate..

I recently built "Low Power Electric Pet Deterrent" from Marc's technical pages:
http://www.marcspages.co.uk/tech/6105.htm

I stayed very faithful to the original layout of the circuit, and double-checked everything.
However, I get no zapping output from the circuit.

1) I supply 220v live from the input on the left,
2) The circuit is well grounded, as I can see from Neon L1 lit all the time,
3) I get nothing from the "sting wire" , after building up courage, I touched the wire
4) The neon L2 blinks intermittently

If I remove the "car coil", and measure the voltage, I observe a steady 130v DC.
The ONLY change I made was to replace C1 1uF capacitor with 5 capacitors connected in parallel (because I didn't have a 1uF handy).

Any ideas what I should check? It's such a simple circuit, I don't understand why it fails to work.

Many thanks,
turgut

 

[Harald Kapp]

L2 blinking intermittently sounds good. It is an indication that the trigger circuit operates. With every blinking of L2 the triac should be triggered. The triac in turn will disscharge C through the transformer, thus creating a current pulse which will be transformed into a high voltage pulse.

Questions:

1. C3 is rated for the max. voltage (at least Vmains_rms*1.42)?
2. The car coils is mounted correctly (low voltage primary to C3, high voltage secondary to sting wire)?

 

[davenn]

The ONLY change I made was to replace C1 1uF capacitor with 5 capacitors connected in parallel (because I didn't have a 1uF handy).

so what caps did you use ? and were they high voltage rated ?