That's my highly scientific equation for Macgyvers out there considering home-brewing their build plates. I'll cover the serial assimilation of those most unfortunate electrical appliances, not to mention just exactly why in a post to follow. Meanwhile:
Slow cookers house a heating element band, wrapped around a steel skirt in which the ceramic pot sits. Keeping the appliance's electronics intact, I flattened this band and kapton-taped it and it's thermistor to to the underside of the build plate. The most basic slow cookers have two settings, low and high. On low the build plate heated up to 60C before thermal losses equalled the thermal gains and the temperature levelled out. (85C @ high). The glass mirror I placed on top of the build plate reached 55C. Great, unfortunately this was without the cooling fan in operation. Turning the fan on brought the temperature plateau down to 41C. While switching to high didn't raise this reading noticably. I inked black the interface between glass and aluminium and added insulation beneath the build plate. This brought the temperature plateau up to 53-8C, with the fan enabled. So finally I can leave Woodsmoke printing unattended! And I can do it with a heated build plate that costs the same to run as a single light bulb! Or at least that's what slow cookers were reputedly run for, back when they were released. Now it's more like an urban legend. Meanwhile the 4 2.2KOhm resistors sit in their bag.
Woodsmoke
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