Reading Capacitor Values

Note: If you are not familiar with units please read the units article and then come back to this one.

On the bigger capacitors, such as filter capacitors (Aluminum Electrolytics) and even signal caps (Yellow, Mallory) the value will be spelled out for you and you won't have to interpret it. On the smaller capacitors which are usually in pF (ceramic disc) there will be a 3 letter code. If the code is XYZ you add Z amount of zeros to XY and the resulting unit is in pF. For example, with 471 you add 1 zero to 47 and you get 470pF. More examples are below.

16	------>	16pF (16x10^-12 Farads)
.014	------>	.014uF (.014x10^-9 Farads)
.11	------>	.11uf (.11x10^-9 Farads)
11	------>	11pF (11x10^-12 Farads)

As a reminder, here is the table of units. The most common units for capacitors are uF and pF, since a normal Farad is a huge amount.

Prefix	Name	Multiplication Factor(exponential form)	Multiplication Factor (normal form)
M	Mega	10^6	1,000,000
k	kilo	10^3	1,000
none	none	10^0	1
m	milli	10^-3	.001
u	micro	10^-6	.000 001
n	nano	10^-9	.000 000 001
p	pico	10^-12	.000 000 000 001

If you have any comments or suggestions please let me know. Thank You.