How to Assemble an Electric Heating Element From Scratch
Posted3 months agoActive3 months ago
solar.lowtechmagazine.comTechstoryHigh profile
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DiyElectric HeatingLow-Tech Solutions
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Diy
Electric Heating
Low-Tech Solutions
The article describes how to assemble an electric heating element from scratch, sparking a discussion on the practicality, safety, and efficiency of the approach, as well as its connection to low-tech and sustainable living.
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Oct 19, 2025 at 9:25 AM EDT
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[Also, I don't like the quality of the images. How can I take their advice seriously if the images are barely viewable. It looks like someone actually made an effort to reduce the quality of the images. For artistic effect, probably. Don't do that.]
> By dithering, we can make images ten times less resource-intensive, even though they are displayed much larger than on the old website.
This is needed because the website is solar-powered and self-hosted on low-tech hardware, read more here:
https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/about/the-solar-website/
> We further apply default typefaces, dithered images, off-line reading options, and other tricks to lower energy use far below that of the average website.
https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/about/the-solar-website/
Battery status 63%, not charging Power used 2.69W Uptime 5 weeks, 11 hours, 36 minutes
Traffic from HN may be a problem today...
Seems to have had no issue whatsoever! Even through the whole night period. Shows the depth of inefficiency of our 'advanced' systems.
down from 63% yesterday but yeah, really good!
They did, and it’s part of the footprint-reduction techniques used to host the site off solar full-time. https://github.com/lowtechmag/solar/wiki/Solar-Web-Design#im...
I think it's acceptable for the drawings to be compressed this way but the photographs are very unclear.
Might as well use your server to generate some of that heat ...
That’s the first thing I noticed too. You can buy a 277VAC/60VDC 7A DIN rail miniature circuit breaker that can handle 7,500 amps of fault current for $20 [0] there’s no excuse other than ignorance for the lack of overcurrent protection. I only know how to use a calculator to figure out AC fault current but that should be enough to handle a solar panel.
It does mention an optional thermal switch and optional thermal fuse, my sauna stove definitely has a thermal switch and I’d include one if I was building this thing too.
[0] https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/phoenix-contact/1...
The image part of your comment was nerd bait so everyone replied to that :P
I was in a boarding school in Ghana in the late 80's and pretty much every day there would be someone boiling water with a fork directly wired to a 240 volt socket. All the beds were metal bunk beds and there was plenty of combustible material in each dormitory.
I am pretty sure this was replicated in the dozens of other boarding schools across the country. Somehow I never heard of any deaths or serious injuries from it.
Not in the slightest bit advocating for it. It was a desperate solution in desperate times but it has massively skewed my comprehension of risk compared to pretty much anyone I meet in Europe.
The floor of the tub was also at least 10" above the bathroom floor. I literally broke a rib trying to get out of the damn thing
Thanks for the trip down memory lane. I had forgotten all about those!
Which leads to an idiotic situation where in Europe it's extremely common to have your washing machine in the bathroom, but in the UK everyone goes "oh no we can't have that it's extremely unsafe" while standing next to an electric shower fused at 32amps.
Tbf the building regulations are meant to make it somewhat safe, but I've personally seen dodgy work done by electricians where they wired a shower using a 16amp wire which obviously subsequently melted after some use.
I am well acquainted with throwing water on resistive heating elements from taking a lot of electric saunas, so electric instant hot water heaters don’t really scare me. The proximity of the current is irrelevant to me when just 30 mA will kill you.
Electric tank water heaters work on the same principle, a high resistance conductor encased in a ceramic insulator which is encased in metal.
So to be fair - until last year(or 2023?) you couldn't have them at all, then they changed the rules to say you can, but they have to be at least 3 metres away from the nearest bath or shower. For reference, my entire bathroom is 2.5m by 2m - and I suspect 99% of British bathrooms aren't much bigger than this. So in theory - you can. In practice....not so much.
For everything else, where more than a KW or two is overkill, the plugs connect between the center tap and one output of the transformer, for 120 V. It gives the advantage of high power where it's needed, up to 12 KW peak or 9.6 continuous, without dangerous voltages where the power isn't needed.
Modern outlets do have all of the modern safety features, like shutters and arc or ground fault detection, but the more appropriate voltage means that when they aren't available, it's still safe. There's kind of a running joke for DIYers that everyone claims to turn the power off before rewiring outlets, but no one really does, unless it's a 240 V outlet.
A near-retirement electrician died wiring up his wife's new mall store by himself with 120.
120 is usually safe-ish, but it has dangerous power still.
A trick I learned when you want to flip the breaker but don't want to go all the way back to the panel is to just stick a screwdriver into a light socket.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MjJ1N4uJyV8
Probably not an issue for oven or cooking temperatures, but it is if you're working on hotter things like heaters or hairdryers and such.
This article tries to use large solder blobs to mechanically trap the nichrome wire, which I don't recommend for the reasons above. You really should use a crimp connection.
Don't all metals melt with heat...?
What I think you mean to say is that (some) solders melt at the temperatures that this heating device operates at?
> Probably not an issue for oven or cooking temperatures
Just looked it up and it appears that most soft solder(what we commonly think of as solder) melts around 400F (200C). so I would worry about a soldered joint in the hot part of an oven as well.
Silicone is not commonly used for this purpose. More common these days is fiberglass, and long ago it was asbestos.
From Google - about how manufactured ....An electric heating element inside a metal pipe is a common design for tubular heaters, which consists of a resistance wire (often Nichrome) coiled in the center of a metal tube. The space between the wire and the tube is packed with an electrical insulator, such as magnesium oxide powder, which conducts heat efficiently while preventing the wire from shorting against the pipe. This design allows for durable, efficient heating as the heat is conducted from the element to the pipe's outer surface....
Probably in a very similar way to mineral insulated cables, if not the exact same process: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mineral-insulated_copper-clad_...
[0]: https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2025/10/how-to-build-a-sol...
But I guess that would go against the "low tech" spirit. And if panels aren't the limiting factor why not
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MrnCDKB1hE0