PRR said:> heater shaking and making a rattling noise as the wires vibrated from first heating up.
> I decided to try duty cycling
PRR said:I must re-endorse the Honeywell cyber-thermostat.
Especially for older electric baseboard which creaks.
...as it gets close to set point, then cycles, it runs the heater at part-power.
Oh.... and I'm running 240V baseboard at 120V. 4 feet of baseboard costs a lot more than you paid, and at 120V outputs a lot less, so may not be for you.
I'm uncertain of your fan hack. Seems if the triac sticks ON, it starts to go the full 1500 Watts, it needs "full fan" to stay safe.
I still have the old in wall resistance heat that works, I just don't like the crude mechanical thermostat. The in wall heater made noise too. If I were to get more sophisticated I might attach a real TOD thermostat to the in-wall unit. I wouldn't want to make a permanent hack that the next owner can't just unplug.
Re: my fan hack, it starts at 1/5 power so I am pretty confident it will run at full power, "and" it looks like there is a thermal fuse on the top of the heater stack, probably a simple temperature sensitive link that physically opens up if the temperature gets high enough, "and" there is also the front panel bimetallic thermostat that even when turned full up, like I have it now, will probably open before 451'F.
[edit] The fan is a cheap POS working in a difficult environment. I expect the fan to be one of the weaker links and not to last as long as the rest of the heater. The thermostat control is sensing temperature inside the heater chassis, so loss of the fan will likely just reduce the amount of heat delivered to the room and not cause catastrophic overheating. If when the fan fails or gets noisy I may just disable it. [/edit]
The tilt switch is cleverly built into the thermostat bi-metallic contact assembly so when tilted it opens the thermostat.
This heater is about a hundred times safer than my old one, ignoring the extra heat output. It even has a high/low switch where one heat coil gets shorted out for max heat... I have it set low but still 2x the power of my old one.
JR
PS, My next project is an indoor storm window design that can reduce a major source of heat loss. More about that later.