Quote Originally Posted by Chris 16409 View Post
Dave how about using gold plated fuses?
I did some testing of the silver plated fuses and did not find any advantage with the testing. Actually the voltage drop was a little higher but I'm assuming voltage drop is just a matter of the lot of when the fuses were made. I did some reading on silver plating and it seems it reduces contact resistance. Since I did have one customer return his overheating fan fail unit and it did turn out to be the contact resistance (removing the fuse and reinstalling it) fixed the problem, I think I will start shipping the fan fail units with silver plated fuses.

The part number marked on the fuses is the same and the only difference I saw is the "20" amp number is underscored on the non-silver fuses. Not sure if that is how they mark them of just a manufacturing change.

Gold has the advantage of not growing a tarnish which could help with aging. But you still have the sockets not gold plated. It looks like the audio customers are the only ones thinking gold provides better audio results. They do use gold plating on circuit board edge connectors but those are not really high current circuits.