My colleague Hazbean suggested I post this.
I have a home-brew roaster which uses both a turbo oven and an electric frypan as heat sources. It also has a stirrer to keep the beans moving. Somewhat inspired by Farmroast's rather lovely 1kg sized roaster of similar construction, I made my stirring mechanism out of 3mm stainless rod rather than the more usual bent flat section.
Over the last couple of years of using this setup, I've taken to (manually) turning the stirring off and on in a crude PWM fashion. A couple of weeks back, I decided to automate that and now have the microcontroller doing the PWM of the motor to control how much stirring gets done.
I operate the stirring arms at a VERY low duty cycle. What I've settled on is basically between 5 and 10 seconds off, and one second on. This results in 100% perfectly uniform roasting with no scorching or tipping.
The noise from the roaster is now quite tolerable - there are periods of silence. Hearing FC (or 2C) is not an issue at all, and it is overall rather more pleasant to use. I suspect this experience can't be transferred to those with drum style roasters (due to the mechanical arrangement) but for those who have KKTO or similar roasters, this would apply. The only thing is I use a geared 24V motor (running at 12V) for the stirring - so it is quite fast. If your KKTO just gently sweeps the beans, the on-time might need to be increased.
Anyway - I view this as a useful mod, and will keep doing this. It really makes the roasting experience more pleasant and it seems to have no nett impact on roast quality whatsoever.
/Kevin
I have a home-brew roaster which uses both a turbo oven and an electric frypan as heat sources. It also has a stirrer to keep the beans moving. Somewhat inspired by Farmroast's rather lovely 1kg sized roaster of similar construction, I made my stirring mechanism out of 3mm stainless rod rather than the more usual bent flat section.
Over the last couple of years of using this setup, I've taken to (manually) turning the stirring off and on in a crude PWM fashion. A couple of weeks back, I decided to automate that and now have the microcontroller doing the PWM of the motor to control how much stirring gets done.
I operate the stirring arms at a VERY low duty cycle. What I've settled on is basically between 5 and 10 seconds off, and one second on. This results in 100% perfectly uniform roasting with no scorching or tipping.
The noise from the roaster is now quite tolerable - there are periods of silence. Hearing FC (or 2C) is not an issue at all, and it is overall rather more pleasant to use. I suspect this experience can't be transferred to those with drum style roasters (due to the mechanical arrangement) but for those who have KKTO or similar roasters, this would apply. The only thing is I use a geared 24V motor (running at 12V) for the stirring - so it is quite fast. If your KKTO just gently sweeps the beans, the on-time might need to be increased.
Anyway - I view this as a useful mod, and will keep doing this. It really makes the roasting experience more pleasant and it seems to have no nett impact on roast quality whatsoever.
/Kevin

I knew that before I did it, but...
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