One of those days

[Tony]

Making some bio - or trying to...

Drywash tower spigot snapped off, biodiesel lost onto the floor.  Great.  Jury rigged something up to drywash the bio anyway.

Set some oil heating.

Came back to check on the state of the drywash system to find the power tripped at the shed end.  Turned it back on.  But - no sign of the heater working.  So either my element has gone pop (most likely) or the SSR has failed after years of faithful service (unlikely).  So I guess I have to drain the processor down to take the element out.  Really not much fun

[Rossey]

Put a multimeter between earth and live on the immersion see if it has a short or between live and neutral to see if its gone open circuit.

[photoman290]

could be the thermostat. most of the new ones have a over temp limit thermostat as well as the adjustable one. try checking across the element terminals with a meter. should be around 18 ohms or so.

[greasemonkey]

I don't think the over temp resets itself, although if it has gone over, there must be a reason for it.

[Tony]

No worries on the thermostat, it doesn't have one

I use a tea urn capillary stat shoved up the immersion's stat hole, and a modified cover to hold it in place.  Then I just use the tea urn's adjustable dial to set the required temperature.  Goes up to 110C.

Anyway, it was definitely the element, as the meter showed it open-circuit.

Here's the element:



I've been processing Chinese oil again, against my better judgement.  That poor element has been working for years before processing that stuff.... ah well.

The only positive things about the process were that

a) I found the box spanner without any trouble (usually it's at least an hour of searching around here)
b) I had a spare to hand complete with fibre washer

[Tony]

And here's my heath robinson drywash spigot fix 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fc1f3CMimms

[Julian]

And here's my heath robinson drywash spigot fix 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fc1f3CMimms

Nothing Heath Robinson about that ... it looks like a carefully designed part of the plant for many of us.

[nigelb]

Ways and means Mr Jackson...ways and means

[Rotary-Motion]

I too had quite a day a couple days back, I put a cubie under the tap in the shed and went out to my car totally forgetting about the oil filling the cubie, anyways long story short, my whole shed base was a sea of part filtered veg oil it was running out of every orifice it could find spilling into the garden, but the worst part is behind my shed are 2 flats with front doors and my shed/garden is a foot higher than there paths and yup you guessed it the whole path was another sea of veg oil, this is when panick set in I used 1 and a half bottles of fairy liquid and buckets and buckets of hot water to hard broom this oil away, there paths looked like it had been snowing with white bubbles every where, anyhooes I got it cleaned up except for all the bubbles and just 10 minutes later my back neighbour came home. how close was that