I thought this was interesting:

http://sewing.patternreview.com/cgi-...l?f=21&t=37758

Personally, I'd replace to be safe and lack of understanding.

Jon

Jon, You're right it is an interesting bit to read. Still I cannot come to a firm conclusion...gathering information.

Thanks guys, glad to hear you understand I'm not trying to start something.

There's no need to replace the capacitor in the vintage Bernina foot controls. The thermo regulator part takes care of any problem.

Actually, Bernina removes the old capacitors from the 730, because they wear out and are no good after 50 years. Or re-wire a new electronic foot control onto the old cord. With the 830 carbon pile foot controls, they remove the capacitor, and replace it with a ceramic thermal switch, which is mounted onto the ceramic shell, and is much safer. On the electronic 830 Bernina foot controls, we do replace the capacitor when the foot control starts to sputter, after the potentiometer has been maxed out. It's a quick un-solder and re-solder job.

Right, the electronic foot controls are a different ball game and have different capacitors. The non electronic Bernina foot controls just need that thermal switch. The 830 has both electronic and non electronic foot controls depending on the year made. The older 830 has the non electronic controls that we're mainly talking about in this thread.

My DH makes electronic music and he has to run a power conditioner between his equipment and the outlet or noise creeps in. I'm not sure how it all works, but somehow the conditioner smooths out all the peaks and valleys and that removes noise.

The only thing ... see, I don't know everything ... I know about capacitors is what I learned from the Featherweight 221 factory here; { http://thefeatherweight221factory.com/page43.php }. So I won't repeat it.

Only one of our machines, my wife's 319K, has a capacitor in the foot controller.
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So far I haven't removed it since it's caused no trouble. However I'm about ready to try an experiment. You see the machine my wife has been using the most, our 328 really messes up our television. They are on the same circuit.
This house is not modern and she likes to sew while I watch the few shows I like. What a pain in eyeballs.
So I'm considering switching the capacitor from the 319 to the 328 to see if it helps the TV.

Joe

I love it! Please be safe...but report back. I'm incredibly curious as to whether this works or not!

The capacitors aren't just there for the line voltage coming in from the power company, that's really a very small part of it. The majority of their purpose is on the internal side of things where as the electricity is moving about it causes fluctuations on the internal power of something (the power being provided by a power supply in the machine which gets its power from the plug in the wall).

More modern electronics are actually much more fraught with issues due to noise on power systems and noise on signals. This is because more modern equipment generally has lower voltage supply so the "margin for error" is also smaller. Additionally, as signals get faster, the sudden change in direction of signal gets faster and the noise is greater. Modern electronics have many, many capacitors in them of several different values, depending on their purpose, how much power or noise or the frequency they are being used for.

Some of this also ties into why I keep my computerized machines (all 2 of them!) on UPS (Uninterruptible Power supplies - also known as battery backups) as well. They're like a consumer grade version of what SteveH is using in his server room. I have a heavier duty UPS on my servers here as well but while I run a production server (think AA) I don't have / need the sort of infrastructure SteveH is using.

Basically, to my mind - any computerized sewing machines should be treated like a computer. I use UPS' for the computers here and so too the sewing machines.

My LongArm and my new to me embroidery machine are both always on a UPS. That helps keep the input power relatively clean at least. Now if I could just find ALL the outlets that are sharing a circuit with my server so I could stop switching it to UPS when I vacuum or use the air compressor!