Hi ArnhemR - it's not suited to the KKTO, you're right, but alas I own a KKTO and it's coffee is not suited to my tastes! So I'm seeing what I can do to modify the design or approach to make it do what I want. One day I'll fail in this pursuit and get a more suitable roaster for my liking :P But in the meantime I'm a student, living in an apartment, with no income of my own so... this is the extent to which my wife will let me go. All I want is those delicious fruity flavours that I know exist in my (especially African) greens. But maybe I'll have to stick to nuttiness and cocoa.
My turbo oven already has (almost) as much control of it as I can wield. I can already control it's power level (albeit through pulsing rather than PWM) from always on through to always off. Rather than let it go full boar, I usually use my PID to set a maximum environment temperature. This isn't ideal, as really I should have the thing on full boar most of the time, and have some way of controlling the airflow to manipulate my environment temps. Corretto owners do this with lids on their bread pans, KKTO owners like yourself typically do it with burping. I found that KKTO approach too difficult to repeat but maybe I should give it another shot.
I'm well aware that my thermocouples will behave uniquely - most of the concern about TCs in this thread is that they have drifted, so what value they have had recently is diminishing - until I fix the problem. Whether I like it or not, TCs are my best guide with my KKTO. With a small bean mass and a large amount of mechanical noise (don't know about you, but my Turbo Oven has got to the stage of rattling and requires retightening regularly) 1C isn't very discernable, and telling steam and smoke apart with such a sealed system is difficult.
Most of the people I have read that are happy with KKTOs are, like yourself, much further north than I am. Makes me wonder whether there is a distinct advantage for the KKTO user in a warmer ambient climate. I had much less finicky roasts in summer (Again well aware that all roasters require adjustments for winter conditions).
On the design front, I would posit that a solution would be to actually build in an exhaust (with fan). Either a tube straight down from false floor through the base, or diagonally from false floor to wall of roaster - which will draw the warm convective air across the beans with much more velocity, pull out chaff, draw out steam and smoke and make airflow a controllable dimension of the roast without more mods to my Turbo Oven. Then I could have the turbo oven always on. But the idea of more Stainless Steel drilling is not at all appealing, and further engineering decisions like diameter of tubes would make it a risky move. Still - I might do that some time as an experiment.
My turbo oven already has (almost) as much control of it as I can wield. I can already control it's power level (albeit through pulsing rather than PWM) from always on through to always off. Rather than let it go full boar, I usually use my PID to set a maximum environment temperature. This isn't ideal, as really I should have the thing on full boar most of the time, and have some way of controlling the airflow to manipulate my environment temps. Corretto owners do this with lids on their bread pans, KKTO owners like yourself typically do it with burping. I found that KKTO approach too difficult to repeat but maybe I should give it another shot.
I'm well aware that my thermocouples will behave uniquely - most of the concern about TCs in this thread is that they have drifted, so what value they have had recently is diminishing - until I fix the problem. Whether I like it or not, TCs are my best guide with my KKTO. With a small bean mass and a large amount of mechanical noise (don't know about you, but my Turbo Oven has got to the stage of rattling and requires retightening regularly) 1C isn't very discernable, and telling steam and smoke apart with such a sealed system is difficult.
Most of the people I have read that are happy with KKTOs are, like yourself, much further north than I am. Makes me wonder whether there is a distinct advantage for the KKTO user in a warmer ambient climate. I had much less finicky roasts in summer (Again well aware that all roasters require adjustments for winter conditions).
On the design front, I would posit that a solution would be to actually build in an exhaust (with fan). Either a tube straight down from false floor through the base, or diagonally from false floor to wall of roaster - which will draw the warm convective air across the beans with much more velocity, pull out chaff, draw out steam and smoke and make airflow a controllable dimension of the roast without more mods to my Turbo Oven. Then I could have the turbo oven always on. But the idea of more Stainless Steel drilling is not at all appealing, and further engineering decisions like diameter of tubes would make it a risky move. Still - I might do that some time as an experiment.



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