As our old toaster oven is too big and doesn’t seem to be efficient enough for the project, we decided to buy a new and smaller toaster oven which we hope would provide a better heat transferring rate. My task for today is to test this new toaster oven.

Following the temperature profile, we want our oven to be able to heat up to the peak of around 440F over the minimum time of  2.5 minutes and the maximum time of 5.5 minutes. I tested our new oven two times, with and without the metal base, to check if there is any difference between the two methods and pick the one that is more efficient. The oven was turned on at maximum temperature for 10 minutes straight as I recorded its immediate temperature every 15 seconds. Therefore, after 10 minutes I was able to gather 40 data points for each graph. Below is my result:

Without base

With base

Apparently, in both methods, the oven reached to our desired peak temperature of 440F at roughly the same time, which is about 345s, or 5 minutes 45 seconds. This is still a bit longer than the time range that we need for our solder paste that we mentioned above. Also, when put on the metal base, the thermometer was able to record the highest temperature of 582F, which is significantly higher than the higher one of 545F when it’s not on the metal base. This result is to be expected because when put on the metal base the thermometer has more interacting surface and therefore it will receive heat faster.