Dana Stripe

Bill refer to this post about my Skutt 231-18 kiln. However, even before I converted it to a digital kiln it fired to cone 6 with a manual kiln setter no problem at all. I suspect your correct in the 150-200 firings but that's typical for almost anyone that mid fires regardless if its rated a cone 6 or a cone 10 kiln (firing to cone 6). Also, supporting this fact is that Skutt sells the same elements for my 231-18 (70's era cone 6 rated) and KM1018 ( modern cone 10 rated). Also the two kilns are rated with the same watts, the main difference being 2.5" brick for the cone 6 vs 3" brick for the cone 10. Also I have no problem getting to a cone 7 with just adding a 5-10 min hold on a cone 6 firing (~2235F).

Neil, Be sure and post some pictures when you get them completed, would like to see how you did it.

Interesting comment my Skutt kiln says the max temp is 2250/cone 6 and I fire it to cone 6-7 regularly with no issue.

Bill I would think cone 01 would be ok for low fire.

Any additional life out of the elements is an extra bonus but SSR life will vastly out live any mechanical relay and it allows for much better temperature control. The relay cycle time is almost instantaneous vs a 10-60 second cycle time for a mechanical relay. Of course the shorter the cycle time the better the temperature control but shorter your mechanical relay life.

Neil, Thank you for the response, your correct I do not have any insulation in the design. However, I have put a sheet of aluminum within the air gap between the box and the kiln to function as a heat shield. It works pretty effectively, the output report states the controller only gets up to about 109F. I wanted to post it here as I could not find a lot of information on how to convert a older kiln. I put a fair bit of time in developing the design and hopefully it can help others. You have a nice set up there also, you build either of those?

Starrs_ridge If you take a look at slide 12 I needed about 1.1A to drive everything so I needed a bigger transformer DP-241-6-24 is 1.25A, the DP-241-5-24 is only 0.5A. The biggest difference is that I have two fans to power to keep everything cool. When I talked to the tech at Bartlett he highly recommended fans in the design to keep the SSR and the controller cool. Also, a common issue I have seen in many forums with controller driven kilns is that its common for the controllers to overheat and will abort the firing cycle so I thought it was a good idea to have them in the dsign. more info on the differences follow this link https://belfuse.com/resources/datasheets/signaltransformer/ds-st-241-series.pdf

You might find this interesting

Uploading here for anyone that's interested in installing a Bartlett Genesis Controller on an older manual kiln. Due to file size limitations complete file can be found here https://drive.google.com/file/d/1p6gW0n2eRcdhVYPq22rkSBLLjY2uM7yq/view?usp=sharing