Am just finishing mods on poppery 1 with separate heat/fan. Am going to use harbor freight router control plugged in to kill-a-watt to monitor and help better learn roasting techniques. Am interested in knowing what 'metric' would be best to be monitoring, watts, volts, or other? In searching here on HB I have only seen one post on this, and was wondering if others had used this type of setup, and suggestions that have worked for roast profiles for time/power (or volt) settings. Thanks in advance for help!

goducks wrote:Am just finishing mods on poppery 1 with separate heat/fan. Am going to use harbor freight router control plugged in to kill-a-watt to monitor and help better learn roasting techniques. Am interested in knowing what 'metric' would be best to be monitoring, watts, volts, or other? In searching here on HB I have only seen one post on this, and was wondering if others had used this type of setup, and suggestions that have worked for roast profiles for time/power (or volt) settings. Thanks in advance for help!

Plug the heater circuit into the router speed control, and then plug that into the kill-a-watt and set it to measure watts. That is a measure of how much power is being consumed by the heating elements, and will be a reliable way to get the same heat output from roast to roast. I used to roast with this modified Poppery:

I used a dimmer for the fan and the router speed control for the heater. The Poppery I has a lot of power, and you will not use it all. You should run a test roast through it at full power to see how it progresses. You will find that it will take the popper a long time to heat up, since there is a lot of metal in there, but once it heats up, it retains the heat, and at full power you will blow through first crack in seconds, and blast directly into second crack. So the router speed control is crucial, since you can back off the heat appropriately. Sorry I don't have data handy from my roasts on that rig, but I recall that I'd start by warming up the popper for a few minutes, then set the power at around 900-1000 watts; When the beans turn yellow, I'd back off the heat a little, and then at first crack back off the heat more. Also don't forget that you can use the fan to control the heat also- less fan = less cooling air, so higher roast temp, and vice versa. In general I tried to use as little fan as necessary to keep the beans moving or to keep the temperature under control.