Well, I've had my Huky for some 5 weeks now and have run quite a few roasts. Quite a lot of learning about everything, coming from a Gene Cafe, where most of the time I just sat waiting for 1C, fiddling with the temp dial a bit and then watching for the right color to appear, press another button and then wait for the whole thing to cool down.
This Huky thingie needs attention! Well, I knew that from the beginning. Anyhow, I digress...
While waiting for my Huky to be assembled and shipped I had some time to read up in this forum about all the tips and twists with the Huky in particular and roasting in general. Thank you all. One thing I decided to do before even starting my first roast was to season the outside of the drum (with veg.oil). I had patience for an hour, which gave me a slight coating. After a few weeks I gave it a couple of hours resulting in a dark brown coating. I used the IR stove all the way as heat source.

Now, how does it affect my roasting? Well, I did a full 500g load of Panama Geisha yesterday, where I never got above 1.5 kPa (~60%) on the gas pressure meter. I got to 1Cs within 8.30 and finished the roast at 11.40 (not being fast enough with taking the gas down during 1C... and I should have dumped some 10-20 seconds earlier).

Just for the record. In Sweden almost all gas is "Gasol", a Propane/Butane mix (for non-freezing reasons) and a standard swedish regulator (which I use) is 30mBar (12 inch WC). I.e. not a lot of pressure. As I roast inside my apartment I'm allowed to use a 5# tank maximum.

To conclude, when I ordered the Huky I was looking around for alternative burners, as some posters doubted the capacity of the IR burner Mr. Li provides. The reason I seasoned the drum was part of my concerns about the possible low burner capacity. Even though I don't have any before/after mesurements, the seasoning was definitely a good thing to do.
Also I take it the graph above is proof enough that the IR burner is strong enough as I'm not even close to full throttle at any time in the roast.

(I would go a bit slower the next time, planning for 1Cs at e.g. 9.30 or so. Roasting isn't about producing a nice graph, but the graph above shows where I did go wrong with the power and air, first at about 4.30 and second in the middle of 1C. This post isn't really about how to fix the above roast, but I don't mind comments on that too.)

Hey there, nice job on seasoning the drum. I've found the same on my Quest M3. Seasoning the outside with oil did wonders for me. Some people use a flat black high-temp paint, either way it gets the job done of more efficiently conducting heat inside. I like it as it basically ups the capacity of the roaster for "free". Or makes roasts at lower capacity more efficient on power/gas.

I like how your graph shows your power and fan. Is that because you've hooked them up to an input on your board? Or do you enter them manually? I haven't figured that part out in Artisan yet, but have been meaning to so I don't have to put it in the notes.

[edit] Looks like I've found the sliders under Config -> Events -> Sliders ...although I can't figure out how to change the scale from 0-100 to 0-11 but anyway, should be good enough for my purposes.

The part with Power/Fan is directly copied from the excellent writeup by Barrie Fairley. As the title says it's about hooking up TC4 to a HotTop it isn't obvious that it applies to others as well. My Artisan setup exactly follows all the steps described in that document. The only difference (obviously) is that I have to make the adjustments on the gas needle/dimmer and simultainously (well...) click the slider in Artisan. These values can be altered later on in the data files, but as long as I know there's e.g. a 5-10 sec deviation from real-time, it's a good enough logg for me.
Also, the values are "guesstimates", where I did make some markings on the gas manometer and on the dimmer. Again, good enough for a decent repeatability. I don't think that a deviation of e.g. 5-10% in the heat output will mess things up as I observe the progress of the roast all the time. If I wanted to be more precise about e.g. the fan I recon I would need to either hook up a Volt meter to a Variac and record the meter values, but I don't see the need for that. It's more about which way to adjust and roughly how much. After a while I hope the controls will become "second nature" as I learn more about what I want to do with a roast.

So, do I understand correctly that you didn't turn the fan on until around the 5 minute mark?

Here's what my Gas and Fan Buttons look like today


I tried the sliders but found them really hard to deal with.
This is much easier, or at least when I remember to push them at all....

Here's what the Buttons configuration looks like:

Great ideas guys! I'm playing around with the sliders on dry runs, and have used that guide to set up colors and graphs a bit better. Will look into the pre-defined buttons to jump me to my usual spots.

bean2friends wrote:So, do I understand correctly that you didn't turn the fan on until around the 5 minute mark?

Well, yes, but in reality it was probably closer to DE. (As I normally turn on the fan first and after that note "fan 10%" on the computer, it was earlier than 5.00 anyhow. Either that or "Oh S--t, the fan should be on..." ) That is part of that basic startout point which KFir wrote up some months ago in another thread (I think it was "Learning My Huky 500". You commented in that thread...) I sometimes add just a little fan (10%, barely moving) just to get the fumes from burning dust out of the kitchen, but I didn't do that in this particular roast... still messing around a bit.

Also, my laptop has a touchscreen, which makes it quite easy to tap at the slider e.g. five times to get to 50%.