Yeah, that’s what I said: What’s soakage? Well, you can read more about that at the end of the multipage article here. He also discusses power storage, and most importantly, how not to measure leakage. The result is that the leakage of the wiring and test leads becomes noticeable, where one would never notice these in a regular circuit. I’ve put three transistors in a circuit so that they are DC coupled and have a huge current gain, over ten million times. The remaining parts are a battery, a LED and 2 current limiting resistors. It takes only nanoamps to turn the transistors on. Same goes with a MOSFET such as the 2N7000, where the gate lead is left open and can touch other surfaces. It will also pick up slight leakages in the nanoamps range.
Back to the article. He shows that it’s important to keep ‘lytics charged up for awhile to ‘reform’ them. The process that they go through in the factory is called forming, which deposits the insulation coating on the capacitor’s aluminum electrodes. After time, that thins out so charging them up again reforms the coating.
