Possible to make it a 110v?

[rjlandry]

Dude I just built a 6x4x4 upright oven using 3 elements and tie it into a 100 amp 220 and it powers it up but it take some time to heat the hole thing about 45 minutes to 400 degrees and uses right at 60 amps. So I also new it would take some time to heat up this much area so i built a devider which is 4x4x2 to cut the time for smaller items such as wheels and intake that doesn't fit in my wall mounted oven.

[wamontgomery]

Originally Posted by rjlandry

Dude I just built a 6x4x4 upright oven using 3 elements and tie it into a 100 amp 220 and it powers it up but it take some time to heat the hole thing about 45 minutes to 400 degrees and uses right at 60 amps. So I also new it would take some time to heat up this much area so i built a devider which is 4x4x2 to cut the time for smaller items such as wheels and intake that doesn't fit in my wall mounted oven.

Yea, that's a great idea....it's just 40 minutes is quite awhile to wait for the sucker to heat up. I'm looking to cut it down to 15-20.

[wamontgomery]

Originally Posted by engineerscott

A 220V 125A service would run your 8 x 3100W heater element array with a little overhead. This is the way I would go. Your total heating power would be 24.8 kW which would give you 60.5 W/ft^3. This is of course less than the 79 W/ft^3 that commercial oven that Caswell sells does, so you would expect it to heat up somewhat slower and it will not have as high of a max temperature unless you have better insulation (and since we don't know how well Caswell's oven is insulated we don't know how much better you'd have to be). That said, I suspect that this will be a workable oven for you.

Remember that if you run a oven heating element designed for 220V at 110V it will not pull the same power. At 220V a 3100W element draws about 14.1A. This equates to a resistance of about 15.6 ohm. If we assume that the resistance of this element is constant (which is actually incorrect since resistance is a function of temperature, although this assumption will do for our purposes) then at 110V this element will dissipate only 775 W. In truth since our assumption about the resistance is slightly wrong it will be a little higher, so lets be generous at call it 1000W. So, if you run your 8 elements at 110V you are only going to get at best 8 kW, which is only 19.5 W/ft^3. I doubt you are going to be happy with this amount of heat in your oven.

Wow, thanks a lot, sounds like you know what your talking about. I'm going to be running two 50 amp breakers in a 100 amp main breaker box. Each 50 amp breaker will feed a contactor and then go to the thermostat and then it will feed 4 oven elements each. Think it will work out ok with 50 amps per 4 elements? I know math figures out for these 8 elements to draw over 100 amps, but in reality they don't draw that much, from what many have said.