View Single Post
  #35 (permalink)   Report Post  
Posted to alt.engineering.electrical,alt.home.repair,misc.consumers,rec.food.cooking,rec.food.equipment
Mark Lloyd Mark Lloyd is offline
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 33
Default "Variable heat" electric range available anywhere?

On Tue, 13 Feb 2007 02:04:41 GMT, "wff_ng_7" >
wrote:

>"ms_peacock" > wrote:
>> I've had numerous electric stoves over the years and the elements don't go
>> on and off on any of them. They already use a "dimmer switch." The heat
>> is constant at whatever setting you put the dial.
>>
>> I had one stove that had an element that was thermostatically controlled
>> and it did vary the heat. But it didn't just go off and on, as the temp
>> of the food came up the element would lower the heat output to maintain
>> the temp. I still miss that stove, it also had an oven and a half.

>
>In reality, those electric stoves were going on and off the whole time, and
>you never noticed! If you have a very quiet kitchen and you listen very
>carefully, you can hear the switch turn the burner off and on. The "dimmer
>switch" is adjusting how long the "on" time is versus the "off" time. The
>owner's manual on my 1982 GE electric range even mentioned the noise the
>switch made in the troubleshooting section, to put to rest the minds of
>people who noticed the sound.
>
>Even dimmer switches for lights are in a way turning the light on and off to
>adjust the light intensity. The dimmer switch is varying the amount of time
>the light bulb filament is turned on versus turned off. Only it is happening
>60 times a second versus every several seconds as on an electric stove
>burner. The principle is basically the same, but on dimmers the controls are
>solid state electronics, while on a stove burner the controls are
>mechanical. It would be costly to make a solid state electronic control to
>handle the power required for a surface burner. Most light dimmers are 300
>watts capacity. A surface burner is about 2,500 watts.
>
>This cycling of the burner is different than thermostatic control. What it
>is doing is keeping the burner on for a percentage of the total time, giving
>a proportional heat output, regardless of how hot the pan ends up getting.
>There are thermostatically controlled surface burners out there, but they
>are not that common.


The old electric stove my grandmother had had one burner that was
thermostatically controlled. The other burners didn't have knobs, but
rows of buttons (labeled something like "high", 'med-high", "medium",
"med-low", "low", "simmer", "warm", "off"). BTW, it also had a 120V
outlet on it. I guess people usually didn't have enough countertop
outlets then.
--
Mark Lloyd
http://notstupid.laughingsquid.com

"Unlike biological evolution. 'intelligent design' is
not a genuine scientific theory and, therefore, has
no place in the curriculum of our nation's public
school classes." -- Ted Kennedy