What would cause my car's turn signal indicator to flash faster?

[wirednuts]

youre both wrong. tiny naked elves walk down the filament making sweet love to it, causing it to stick together again.

 

[Mike Gayner]

the part that makes the bulbs flash is thermo-controlled. the more bulbs you have, the less heat you get building up in the flasher, so it doesnt work as fast.

newer flashers overcome this with various methods, but really its a safety feature to have the bulbs flash faster when something is wrong, so you know whats up and you can fix it.

No one's gonna call this guy out for making up this complete nonsense?

 

[JCH13]

No one's gonna call this guy out for making up this complete nonsense?

There's shooting fish in a barrel, then there's a tactical nuke in a puddle...

 

[Zenmervolt]

the part that makes the bulbs flash is thermo-controlled. the more bulbs you have, the less heat you get building up in the flasher, so it doesnt work as fast.

newer flashers overcome this with various methods, but really its a safety feature to have the bulbs flash faster when something is wrong, so you know whats up and you can fix it.

1) Turn signals haven't used thermal relays for quite some time now. Modern systems tend to use flasher relays that are either capacitor based or transistor based.

2) With the old thermal relays, the more bulbs you have (and hence, the more current flow you have), the faster it flashes. The old thermal strips would either flash very slowly or stick "on" when a bulb was out.

3) New flashers don't "overcome" the fast flash with a bulb out at all. In fact, they rely on that as an indicator for the driver and often explicitly state such in the owner's manual.

ZV

 

[ShawnD1]

oooo gettin very technical now... most of the time that ive known, those terms have been used interchangeably.

The impedance is a combination of resistance, inductance, and capacitance.
impedance = resistance + j(inductive reactance - capacitive reactance)

Inductance and capacitance are usually not a big part of DC impedance because inductance is related to current fluctuation and capacitance is related to voltage fluctuation. Since AC is all about constantly changing voltage and current, both inductors and capacitors can put a hard limit on how much current can flow through an AC circuit. DC doesn't change direction the way AC does. In DC, inductors prevent rapid current change and capacitors prevent rapid voltage change, but neither puts a hard limit on how much current can flow.

Zenmervolt is right about them using capacitors and transistors. A transistor is a voltage controlled switch, and capacitors fight against changes in voltage. When used together, a capacitor controls the voltage in part of a circuit, and that voltage going above a certain level allows current to flow through a transistor. By charging and discharging a capacitor, it allows a transistor circuit to open and close. If the speed of this cycling changes, it means something in that circuit changed. Maybe the alternator and battery voltage is too high (not likely), or the resistance of the circuit changed because one of the lights just burned out