deadmandave said:

Woo!! Congrats. Definitely a milestone. The thing is a beast! How does it handle when you need to move it?

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Surprisingly well, the beefy trailer tires actually make it very smooth to move around, even with it empty it still weighs 250-300LBs so it’s like dragging an unconscious linebacker lmao, thankfully I’m also pretty stocky myself growing up on a farm in the south has definitely helped prepare me for lugging this thing around


Also wanted to mention i checked the gauge tonight after 24 hrs @40psig and it only dropped to 32 psig so that’s an 8 increment loss in pressure which was discovered to be a slow drip at the cap on one of my top pipe stems that i removed the pressure relief valve T and temporarily capped off so i could get the pressure above 20 psi so it isn’t even applicable not to mention 40psig is a little over double what im operating at

On another note i started prefabricating the electrical components today so i have my PID in a weatherproof box and drilled and added 2 flex connectors at the bottom that will feed 10Awg to each element and i popped in a hole on the top right for the thermostat leads and made sure to leave enough room where i can add additional components like an emergency alarm indicator, cooling fan for the solid state relay and other things








Here’s some Ai slop I made to help visualize the concept and placement lmao ChatGPT wanted to be funny i guess and made sure to make it realistic and include the rust





Also prefabed the flex whips to the modified LB conduit bodies that will attach to the elements, I had to do a lot of frowned upon modifications to step the conduit body down from 1 1/4 to 3/4 lmao but it turned out very nicely

deadmandave said:

50 psi?? Were you nervous when you saw that?

the conduit runs look good imo. Different than the ai's depiction but at least the patina is consistent.

Love the idea for the temp probe, much less chance of it ever leaking or needing maintenance.

How much water you think you'll run in it? 10kw is gonna heat it quickly. Is that gonna need 480v?

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No i don’t think I’d say nervous as much as I was excited, it was under hydrostatic pressure so worst case scenario it would just remind me of my ex and squirt me in the face ……  I should call her lmao


As an electrician I criticize my own work more scrupulously then others… it bothers my OCD lol,

I hate the patina, i bought paint and a paint gun just for this project, i used to paint airplanes and cars so this will be a breeze, i just don’t have any of my old painting equipment or sand blaster so i might have to buy one if i can’t get it cleaned up with just a grinder and wire wheel,

im gonna first strip all the rust with phosphoric acid and treat the base metal with a corrosion blocker then use a black oil based semi-gloss rustoleum in the spray gun and then i think I might stencil on the iconic renaissance “Sun in Splendour” I use in my profile pic


The thermowell idea actually came from my nuclear welder friend, it’s a common practice in his industry dealing with steam reactors that can’t get contaminated or have outside objects introduced

For the water I’m not sure exactly volume wise but I expect the bottom 1/5 to 1/4 of the tank, I’ll try to track the exact volume later as I get to the final part of this before actually running it

It will be set up like my atmospheric steamer build with 240v 25Amps per element being feed into a 50Amp plug and disconnect which will be supplied by a 50 amp GFCI breaker back at the main panel


I’m confident 2 4500w elements will be enough i wanted to install 5kw elements but couldn’t find them but i might upsize in the future so technically I’m only pushing 9kw through it but to put that in perspective I have an atmospheric steamer that only uses 1 5kw element on 240v and it holds a similar volume of water, it reaches boiling 212f within 30 minutes on just a single element so i believe 2x  4.5kw would be overkill, in fact the second one will actually only serve as a “power boil” function that will get toggled off at 212f and only the “primary heater” will stay on and be adjusted by the PID

catoblepa said:

I fucking love this project!!! And the outcome too! It's a beautiful, beefy autoclave. The only thing I would do differently is using a digital manometer to automate the cycle: boiling water at 15 psi is automatically at 121 C, so no need for another threaded insert and the thermocouple. I would then connect a microcontroller to the manometer to read the pressure and drive the heaters and the release valve for the whole cycle.

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deadmandave said:

Very nice. Lots of safety features. Honestly it's so robust I would feel safe with the minimum safeties.

Curious how the low water pressure sensor will connect. Does it require a hole near the water level?

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I appreciate your vote of confidence lmao but as a master tradesman I know over engineering is worth the effort

I’m glad you asked, i actually had to do a little work around to make this work, At least on paper, the results will determine if I got it right or not lmao

So it’s essentially a continuity prob, it has a ceramic insulated anode in the center and a grounded metal screw shell (think of a screw in light bulb) only the top of the probe is exposed metal so when it makes contact with water it completes the circuit through the metal body of the tank,

The real issue though is that the 170sv model I bought has 0 tolerance threshold so it will drop the contactor if there’s any rapid boiling from the elements, the solution is to create a “still well” or “diving bell” apparatus, granted they make a more expensive model that that has a 15 second delay just for this reason I was already locked in and bought this before doing the research on it, so simple solution that I’m hoping will work is to use a 90° elbow facing downward that the probe threads into so the water level comes up into the bell end but is unaffected by the boiling turbulence of the water, additionally I will have to drill a hole in the top of the bell to prevent vapor lock which would give me a false low water signal, the diving bell 90° elbow is a female to male threaded stainless steel fitting that will then thread through the tank wall into a stainless steel 3/4 coupling that I will have welded in 3 inches above the element level but in between them under my control panel so it is away from direct heat and then my probe will thread into the external wall through that same 3/4 coupling and the tip of the probe will sit in the bell, I’ll assemble it dry for you as a mock up in a minute since it actually just arrived



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Here’s those pics for you











the cool thing is that I can extend a wire from the control harness and mount the sensor on the side wall or I can keep it together and mount the whole black box with the probe on the side, for aesthetics sake though I will like run a probe wire and mount the black box control relay up at or inside the main controller panel to keep all electrical components together