HomeRoast Digest

Topic: Cooling Beans with mod. Poppery II. (2 msgs / 33 lines)
1) From: GerardFF 
  I was recently forced to revert to using a Poppery II for roasting when my 
HWP sang the death song. While attempting to modify an extra Poppery II to 
just run in "cool" mode I misfigured and burnt the motor up.
How can I run the motor only?  It's obvious that the heating coil acts as a 
giant resistor (or more) for current reduction to the motor.  Can I solder in 
a bigger resistor or something else that will allow me to run 120V AC or 
could I hook the motor directly to  say a DC power supply of a lesser 
volts/amps?
  Does anyone know what the ratings are on the little fan motors?  I could 
not find anything marked on them.  
I'll post my comparisons using the 3 various popcorn poppers versus the HWP 
if anyone is interested.
GerardFF
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2) From: EuropaChris 
The PII has TWO resistors in the circuit.  One resistor is the main heating element.  It runs directly across the AC line.  The other resistor is the voltage dropping resistor for the motor.  The motor is rated for 20VDC, so there is a little bridge rectifier at the motor itself to convert the AC into DC, and then the smaller resistor in series with the motor drops the rectified voltage down to where the motor is happy.  
Therefore, you can only disable the main heating resistor, which is a fairly easy modification.  I did this on my PII, and once I hit the desired roast, I flip the switch and within a minute or two, the roast temp is down to 150 degrees, where I then unplug the unit and pour out the beans, which are just slightly warm to the touch.  The small element only contributes a rather small amount of heat.  The main element does 90% of the heating.
BTW, the wb roaster works exactly on this principal.  Basically, it's a PII with a fancy enclosure and a digital readout.  The guts are pure PII.  But, as the PII's tend to work really well, that's not such a bad thing.
Chris
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