strangemagic

We're still troubleshooting and haven't had much luck. I'll be calling Skutt asap to see what they can tell me. We felt we had found the culprit when my partner looked at the thermocouple and tightened some wires that seemed loose. He fixed a mistake of the red and black wires going into the wrong place, so they are now as the directions say they should be (Sorry I'm translating what he told me on this). After that I filled the kiln with sacrificial seconds and set it to a slow speed cone 6 fire. Once again all the cones (5, 6, 7) melted to puddles and some amount of ware stuck to the shelves.

Thank you for your responses! Yes, the thermocouple is new, standard Type K. No kilnsitter, just the thermocouple to read the temp. Also, I stopped being lazy and kiln washed the shelves Dick: I did wonder how much the temp would be affected by not having the kiln full. Yesterday I loaded the kiln with mugs, though perhaps not full enough because the results seem about the same. I loaded three shelves with about 10 mugs each. The capacity is 9.9 cubic feet so I could have fit twice as much on the shelves. This time the fire ran about 8 hours, just half an hour longer than the empty fire and reported the same bisque temp. The cones are just as melted down as before, and the wares are visibly fired beyond the usual bisque look. I'm wondering if this still seems normal given the amount I filled the kiln. I can start looking into offseting the thermocouple but I'm feeling pretty nervous about potentially overfiring at glaze time!! Any suggestions on next steps?

Hello, I recently acquired a used Skutt 1227 and want to ensure its in good working condition before I begin firing my orders, which are piling up. Unfortunately the kiln seems to be overfiring and my trouble-shooting hasn't helped. I'm new to firing but have read up on what to do. We started by replacing the elements and the thermocouple, and did the following for an 04 test fire: -packed the kiln with furniture -placed a set of cones on each shelf (03 04 05) - set the kiln to run at 04, medium speed, with no hold Kiln ran for a duration of 7.32 hours and reported reaching 1948 degrees. The cones however all melted down (image attached). I'm inexperienced here, but does this seem unusual? I saw some discussion about calibration, so is that a normal part of the process that I'm missing? (One other thing I will note incase it could play a factor is that we rewired the kiln to be single phase and are running it on a 50 amp breaker. It is quite close to maxing out the breaker which I understand is not good, but I don't know if that's something that could play in to overfiring.) Thanks in advance for your input!