Monday, March 24, 2014

Digital Kiln Conversion



How many hours have you spent watching to see when that little cone will melt and flip the switch on your kiln?  If you have a manual kiln sitter you know what I'm talking about.  With no indicator to tell you what the temperature is or how far the kiln still has to go, you check it every 5 minutes when you should be working on something else.  It's nerve wracking to say the least.

I hope to solve that problem, and a few others, on my kiln by converting it to a digital controller.  In addition to the actual, real-time feedback of the kiln temperature, I'll be able to program the kiln to increase temperature at a desired rate and hold for a designated period of time.  All this hopefully means better, more efficient firing.  Let's get started.
Electro Sitter 3 Key-Cone Fire Electronic Controller


When I began researching this conversion I, of course, went online to see what information or tutorials I could find.  To be honest, I was disappointed with the lack of information on the subject.  Isn't everything supposed to be on the internet by now?   Maybe most people just upgrade their whole kiln.  That wasn't in my budget.  I bought a digital controller made by Olympic that is designed to replace the old kiln sitter.

Here is my lovely kiln before the conversion.  See the little gray box of the kiln sitter? That's what will be replaced. Well, sort of. you'll see.