1. Home
  2. Electronics Repair
  3. Old jug element makes good dummy load?

Old jug element makes good dummy load?

My old $10 electric jug finally failed due to arcing at the mains socket. However the 2200W 240V heating element is still serviceable. It occurred to me that it may be useful as a dummy load. Some searching revealed that others have had the same idea.

My own element has a resistance of 27R to 28R which I suppose could be used as a 1A load on a 24V supply. In the USA, a 120V 1500W element would have a resistance of 9.6 ohms which may be close enough for testing audio amplifiers. You wouldn't need to dismantle two working jugs. Instead you could chop off the mains plug and connect the bare wires to the amp's speaker terminals, or you could make an adapter using a mains socket and a short length of cord. The dummy load would be water cooled, and you could have a cup of coffee when you finished testing. :-)

==================================================================== This was my 4th attempt at posting this message. Astraweb appears to have some kind of filter bot in place.

- Franc Zabkar

--
Please remove one \'i\' from my address when replying by email.
Reply to
Franc Zabkar
Loading thread data ...

=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D= =3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D

For someone on the west side of the big pond, what is an "electric jug"?

Reply to
hrhofmann

On Fri, 19 Dec 2008 15:21:26 -0800 (PST), "hr(bob) snipped-for-privacy@att.net" put finger to keyboard and composed:

Electric kettle.

- Franc Zabkar

--
Please remove one \'i\' from my address when replying by email.
Reply to
Franc Zabkar

If the heating element is made from a spring shaped resistance it may have too much inductance to be usable for some purposes. You might want to measure for inductance.

Bill K7NOM

Reply to
Bill Janssen

Crock Pot

Reply to
Allodoxaphobia

Surely that goes back to the stone-age, literally, certainly before metal and fireproof clay cook-pots became available, let alone electric. Crocks or stones are heated in a fire and then transfered with split twig to a wooden bowl of cold water.

-- Diverse Devices, Southampton, England electronic hints and repair briefs , schematics/manuals list on

formatting link

Reply to
N_Cook

On Fri, 19 Dec 2008 16:41:52 -0800, Bill Janssen put finger to keyboard and composed:

The element I'm thinking of is not the exposed nichrome (?) wire type. Instead it looks something like this:

formatting link

I don't know what the internal construction is like, but its inductance does not register on my DMM's 2mH (milliHenry) scale. It measures 26.8 ohms on my DMM, and between 27 and 28 ohms on Bob Parker's ESR meter.

Here are several measurements of real speakers that I made using the latter:

formatting link

- Franc Zabkar

--
Please remove one \'i\' from my address when replying by email.
Reply to
Franc Zabkar

I use 12v 20w and 50w halogen bulbs as dummy loads on power supplies, for instance when I'm repairing LCD TV PSUs which output 24v at around 4 amps for the backlights. I just hook them in series and parallel as required. A couple of extra 'advantages' are that the low resistance when they are cold does a good job of simulating the current surge that a 'real' backlight inverter pulls when it strikes the tubes up, and the light output from the lamps is a good indicator that the PSU is still running, when you are leaving up the corner on extended soak test.

I've never tried one as an RF dummy load, but given that some of the low power CB dummy loads from way back were just a small flashlamp-type bulb grafted into a PL259 plug, I guess it might be worth dusting off my power and SWR meters, to see what they are like. Might also be worth doing some experiments at audio, although I do have a totally resistive high power load that I normally use for testing.

Arfa

Reply to
Arfa Daily

ElectronDepot website is not affiliated with any of the manufacturers or service providers discussed here. All logos and trade names are the property of their respective owners.