After adding a home made grounding system to my 94 FD, I’m pleased that the idle smoothed out a bit and the 3K hesitation is greatly reduced. I’ve been thinking about adding a 1 or two farad capacitor in parallel with the battery as a possible further improvement.

Has anyone worked with one of these?

http://www.sigmaautomotive.com:8080/HVS/hvs.html

I can’t imagine that it’s much more than a large capacitor … similar to the ones that are used with high power car stereo amplifiers.

It’s interesting that there are three models. A horsepower gain, torque gain and one that does both. I can’t imagine how a device that parallels the battery (attaches to the positive and negative terminals) can be set to specifically effect horsepower, torque or both?!?!?

Anyway, what do you guys think?

 

I'd advise you to follow your intuition. It looks to be a snake-oil filled capacitor.

It does look to be in parallel with the battery -- like a capacitor.

It MAY be a combination of several types of caps. Like a bank of larger electrolytic or high-valued carbon caps, and maybe another bank of tantalum or similar caps to lower the ESR and hi-freq impedance (to help reduce noise in the system). Maybe that's the difference between "models".

I'm not saying it wont help with any problems. But if the electrical system in the car is in good shape (battery, alternator [esp. the regulator], ecu's internal power conditioning circuitry) and properly configured for what you're running (like a big *** alternator for a big *** stereo), then it or any capacitor (at the battery anyway) wont make much of a difference. [But, a cap on an audio amp is a different story]

Go ahead and try a big cap on the battery... it couldn't really hurt. [ I wont be held responsible if it does! :P ]