Do your power supplies leak?

 Do your power supplies leak?

"Feet" for my Meanwell power supply. the are surplus pi zero case covers. A good test for leakage in a switching power supply (with no ground wire connected) is to hold the aluminum case with one hand and touching your bare foot on a concrete floor. If you get even the slightest tingling effect, it means there is some AC leakage in your power supply. This goes for switching as well as for linear power supplies. Excessive leakage may cause serious shock specially if you touch two ungrounded cases of equipment connected to two different supplies which have leakage. (no ground pin on the plug or no connection to house electrical ground).

This has happened once in our club radio shack. I had told the owner of an Astron linear power supply that one Astron transformer has to be rewound because I could sense the leakage with my hand. He forgot to have it done and a year later a visiting foreign ham got "shocked" when fuses blew when connected two equipment each connected to a separate supply. If he had touched the two equipment at the same time just before they were connected with a piece of coax, he would have certainly felt the shock. To be fair to Astron which makes great power supplies let me say that the power supply that had the leakage had originally an power transformer 110 volt primary but was "locally" rewoud to a make it 220v. It is my feeling that the rewind job was not so good, hence the AC leakage.

Many chinese generic switching power supplies mean well but only "Meanwell" of Taiwan is known for making switching supplies good enough for ham use. Check the eham.net reviews. Even though is it quiet compared to most Chinese generic LED power supplies, there are still filter designs in the internet to improve its performance. for the purist, one could use an energy guzzling analog power supply for HF work but for VHF, UHF and casual HF, the meanwell does a good job and with cost savings due to its efficiency.