Heating Coil
Turns electricity into heat. Set it under a Crucible, Boiler or anything else you'd put on a Firebox, and it heats it.
Crafting
C W C
W W
C W C
C is Ceramic and W is Fine Wire of the element metal:
- Copper Heating Coil: Copper Fine Wire
- Iron Heating Coil: Iron Fine Wire
Using it
Put the vessel on top and run cable to the coil. It asks for 2 A. It has no switch; put a Breaker in its line to turn it on and off by hand or with a Controller.
The power it turns into heat is volts × amps. So the coil is as hot as its supply:
| Supply | Small crucible settles near |
|---|---|
| Dynamo, fine winding, at a Steam Engine's speed (6 V, 2 A) | 290 Tu |
| The same dynamo on a Hand Crank (12 V) | 560 Tu |
The element runs a little hotter than what it's heating, and heats its vessel the same way a fire does: fast while there's a big difference, slower as they get close.
Not like a fire
- It stops almost instantly. The element is light, so cut the power and it has almost nothing left to give. A fire's character is its fuel; a coil's is its supply.
- It's steady and controllable. No fuel to vary, no air to manage.
- It isn't hot enough to smelt. Nothing in the game today pushes a coil to metalworking heat. It's for low, precise jobs: tempering, preheating, raising steam.
The element's limit
Each element metal has a temperature it can run at forever:
| Coil | Runs safely up to |
|---|---|
| Copper | 300 Tu |
| Iron | 500 Tu |
Above that, the element wears, faster the further over, down to half condition. A worn element puts out less heat. It never breaks.
So the iron coil is the upgrade: the same machine with a better element you can point at.