cjdelphi:
I have a circuit that powers a 11watt fluro tube from 12v, so i decided to have some fun and ramped it up to 16v, 20v, kept turning to max out this step up voltage regulator and i was starting to hit around 25volts
and BANG!!!!, the input capacitor exploded the whole house heard it, it was a 16v 10uf or pf, not sure, i replaced it with a 100pf 25v cap and cranked up the voltage to 22 volts getting a spark gap of around 6cmbut anyway whatever happened it knocked out my computer (not even on the same circuit) reset my arduino (Which shared the same battery) something weird happened just before or just after huge amounts of energy for a brief moment was consumed my voltage regulator could not care less it seems must have spiked over 6amps which it was happy with, shame the voltage regulator powering the arduino could say the same, and as for why my computer died (power on, screen off) usb is not connected there's no shared link, it's isolated, but it was enough to make the arduino go spastic and tell me there's a power out (located about 1 meter away).
as for the bang, it's deafening not nice .... but sure was FUN!!!!
In high school (1970's) I once "plugged" several large (1000 uF) electrolytic caps into the outlets in the school metal shop. They shut off the circuit breakers at the end of the day, so the caps sat there until the next morning.
Next morning when the instructor turned on the breakers, all the caps exploded in a shower of paper shreds and smoking electrolyte oil!
Nobody ever found out who did it.........