Miss Silvia has a digital thermometer. But not for long. An hour long in fact.
The small digital multimeter stuck with blue tack to the wall behind her was hardly aesthetic. There was the yellow k-type thermocouple wire, and the two probes from the DMM connected to the T/c spades.
And since the DMM has no thermometer function, voltage readings (from around 1.0 to 4.7) had to be converted to degreesC.
Its the thermometer you have when you havent got a digital thermometer. The mental gymnastics of converting volts to degrees was turning coffee making a chore.
So, after much unsuccessful internet searching, yesterday I dropped in to Jaycar and bought a neat digital thermometer, about the size of a matchbox, with its own probe, and high/low alarms.
Mmmm, set the alarm for 95C and when it beeps, brew.
Nope. The thermometer is too slow to respond to quickly changing conditions in that 300ml brass boiler. It could be as much as 30secs to 60 secs behind reality.
It goes back to the shop today, and the $40 will instead be spent on a DMM with thermometer function (complete with k-type thermocouple). Thatll be the 4th multimeter here, not including 3 analogue ones.
The blue-tack set up, however, has been great to evidence what is going on in the machine...temperature rise and falls, when it happens, and so on. It proved at a glance that what is suspected of happening actually does.
-Robusto
The small digital multimeter stuck with blue tack to the wall behind her was hardly aesthetic. There was the yellow k-type thermocouple wire, and the two probes from the DMM connected to the T/c spades.
And since the DMM has no thermometer function, voltage readings (from around 1.0 to 4.7) had to be converted to degreesC.
Its the thermometer you have when you havent got a digital thermometer. The mental gymnastics of converting volts to degrees was turning coffee making a chore.
So, after much unsuccessful internet searching, yesterday I dropped in to Jaycar and bought a neat digital thermometer, about the size of a matchbox, with its own probe, and high/low alarms.
Mmmm, set the alarm for 95C and when it beeps, brew.
Nope. The thermometer is too slow to respond to quickly changing conditions in that 300ml brass boiler. It could be as much as 30secs to 60 secs behind reality.
It goes back to the shop today, and the $40 will instead be spent on a DMM with thermometer function (complete with k-type thermocouple). Thatll be the 4th multimeter here, not including 3 analogue ones.
The blue-tack set up, however, has been great to evidence what is going on in the machine...temperature rise and falls, when it happens, and so on. It proved at a glance that what is suspected of happening actually does.
-Robusto


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