P9 has been pulling different wattage from 1450 on up to 1515 @120v (USA). There is a perceptible change on the roast curve depending on the wattage pull at P9. Typically the variance of 15watts has little impact, but anything 20watts or more has greater influence if P9 is engaged over a minute.
there is much less variation of power use at lower P settings. P8 and lower doesn’t see much deviation outside of maybe 10 watts.
Do all R1 bullets do this? is there a way to cap power draw at P9 to something like 1480watt pull to preserve roast profile consitsency when using P9?
IIRC you have an R1 and that roaster has throttling of the power depending upon the temp of the power control devices. If that sensor on the power board sees the junction temperature rising to an unsafe level it throttles the power regardless the setting. It’s a safety measure to save the power board. I got over grumbling about it when I realized it was a case of live with it or keep a supply of spare power boards.
In my case it’s a warm-weather issue. During the winter the unheated shop is ideal for roasting, but come spring it gets to be a pain. So I have a choice: roast very early or roast very late. I don’t handle ‘very early’ at all well, so I stay up late roasting.
To get more time on the roaster I bought a swamp cooler which helps immensely, but then I’m in the very dry Arizona desert which makes it tolerable. A swamp cooler isn’t going to help much in a high humidity area which means air conditioning (vs. a cheap swamp cooler).
I’m on older firmware, and have not been able to find infobon this in the forums yet. maybe someone else on newer fw has seen a solution? maybe even through a calibration work around?
Newer f/w has the throttling but I’m not able to tell you which version first implemented it. I have fw v/615 installed (iirc!) and I thought I had avoided the issue but that’s not the case.
From my perspective the only way to manage the throttling effect is to roast in a cool environment… which means I haven’t figured out how to deal with it! The reason for the f/w throttling is that high room temp kills R1 power boards. Aillio is doing the right thing by keeping us safe but it sure gets in the way in warm weather.
This is pretty standard for the R1. Normally there is less power draw when the drum is cold.
It might also depend on your line voltage as the power will change a little bit when this is going up or down. There is compensation built-in to mitigate this, but it cannot cope with very large swings in voltage.
A bit of variance is seen on every power level. usually only a few watts up or down. and it has little effect on the roast.
P9 has much bigger deviations of 30w on up near 100w drop in power draw.
If there is no way to cap P9 to 1480watt, then I’d be willing to make a formal feature request. maybe just a simple toggle box for “eco” or something deeper in RT settings. This forum thread is just seeing if anyone has figured out the option yet, or if it already exists.