One thing to be aware of: nichrome wire heats up. Solder melts with heat. So if you solder them together, and your nichrome wire gets hot enough, they will not stay attached. Hence commercial devices use a mechanical, crimp connection.
Probably not an issue for oven or cooking temperatures, but it is if you're working on hotter things like heaters or hairdryers and such.
Your standard electronics solder is not going to stick to nichrome anyway. You have to seek out special brazing materials and difficult fluxes to even get that far.
True story (even though as the years go by I find it hard to comprehend myself)
I was in a boarding school in Ghana in the late 80's and pretty much every day there would be someone boiling water with a fork directly wired to a 240 volt socket. All the beds were metal bunk beds and there was plenty of combustible material in each dormitory.
I am pretty sure this was replicated in the dozens of other boarding schools across the country. Somehow I never heard of any deaths or serious injuries from it.
Not in the slightest bit advocating for it. It was a desperate solution in desperate times but it has massively skewed my comprehension of risk compared to pretty much anyone I meet in Europe.
Not uncommon in Brazil to have an electric water heater installed on a shower head, sometimes with lightly covered wiring. Was gobsmacked when I first saw them. One even gave me a tingle when touching the faucet and I told the owner. :sweat-smile:
I remember some showers I took in Rio that, to my surprise/dismay, required bringing a match along to light the water heater within the shower. That now seems tame by comparison.
[Also, I don't like the quality of the images. How can I take their advice seriously if the images are barely viewable. It looks like someone actually made an effort to reduce the quality of the images. For artistic effect, probably. Don't do that.]
I just took the original first image from the article and compressed it to a 37k JPEG, the same size as the dithered image, and it looks a lot better. They must be considering resources to display the image, not just file size and network bandwidth.
Images aren't like that for artistic effect, but for lower energy consumption.
> We further apply default typefaces, dithered images, off-line reading options, and other tricks to lower energy use far below that of the average website.
Ok, I didn't read that. But I still think it's _not_ a good idea to do that for a topic where personal safety is at stake. And besides, the quality is really too low anyway. I can barely recognize the thermocouples in those images.
How can I take your comment seriously if you didn't read the article? It looks like someone didn't actually make an effort to understand the context of the images.
That's fine for the main article but I think there should be a way to get higher quality images should the reader request them. If power is a concern those can be hosted elsewhere.
I think it's acceptable for the drawings to be compressed this way but the photographs are very unclear.
That’s the first thing I noticed too. You can buy a 277VAC/60VDC 7A DIN rail miniature circuit breaker that can handle 7,500 amps of fault current for $20 [0] there’s no excuse other than ignorance for the lack of overcurrent protection. I only know how to use a calculator to figure out AC fault current but that should be enough to handle a solar panel.
It does mention an optional thermal switch and optional thermal fuse, my sauna stove definitely has a thermal switch and I’d include one if I was building this thing too.
Why not use cast or wrought iron and fire bricks for a higher temperature rating? What you’d have then is basically a wood stove except with the wood replaced with electricity.
Nichrome increases in resistance with temperature = choose the right wire gage and coil length and you can achieve a steady state at a particular voltage which will mean it will approach a temperature = not burn food, although this design does not look like it will have that problem - unless the insulation allows it?
Some solution with a maximum power point tracking inverter would probably be a whole lot more efficient. But probably depends a lot on the exact resistances and panels involved.
But I guess that would go against the "low tech" spirit. And if panels aren't the limiting factor why not
Probably not an issue for oven or cooking temperatures, but it is if you're working on hotter things like heaters or hairdryers and such.
I was in a boarding school in Ghana in the late 80's and pretty much every day there would be someone boiling water with a fork directly wired to a 240 volt socket. All the beds were metal bunk beds and there was plenty of combustible material in each dormitory.
I am pretty sure this was replicated in the dozens of other boarding schools across the country. Somehow I never heard of any deaths or serious injuries from it.
Not in the slightest bit advocating for it. It was a desperate solution in desperate times but it has massively skewed my comprehension of risk compared to pretty much anyone I meet in Europe.
[Also, I don't like the quality of the images. How can I take their advice seriously if the images are barely viewable. It looks like someone actually made an effort to reduce the quality of the images. For artistic effect, probably. Don't do that.]
> By dithering, we can make images ten times less resource-intensive, even though they are displayed much larger than on the old website.
This is needed because the website is solar-powered and self-hosted on low-tech hardware, read more here:
https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/about/the-solar-website/
> We further apply default typefaces, dithered images, off-line reading options, and other tricks to lower energy use far below that of the average website.
https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/about/the-solar-website/
Battery status 63%, not charging Power used 2.69W Uptime 5 weeks, 11 hours, 36 minutes
Traffic from HN may be a problem today...
They did, and it’s part of the footprint-reduction techniques used to host the site off solar full-time. https://github.com/lowtechmag/solar/wiki/Solar-Web-Design#im...
I think it's acceptable for the drawings to be compressed this way but the photographs are very unclear.
Might as well use your server to generate some of that heat ...
That’s the first thing I noticed too. You can buy a 277VAC/60VDC 7A DIN rail miniature circuit breaker that can handle 7,500 amps of fault current for $20 [0] there’s no excuse other than ignorance for the lack of overcurrent protection. I only know how to use a calculator to figure out AC fault current but that should be enough to handle a solar panel.
It does mention an optional thermal switch and optional thermal fuse, my sauna stove definitely has a thermal switch and I’d include one if I was building this thing too.
[0] https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/phoenix-contact/1...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MrnCDKB1hE0
But I guess that would go against the "low tech" spirit. And if panels aren't the limiting factor why not