Knowing that the oven’s current state would not be efficient enough for the complete reflow soldering process, we decided to figure ways to improve its overall performance. One big reason behind why it’s not really efficient enough is because even though the oven has 4 heating elements in total, its internal capacity is too big and thus it takes longer time for the oven to heat up. Therefore, by placing some large bricks into the oven to occupy the volume, we hope that there would be less air inside the oven to heat up.
Noticing that the bricks by themselves might absorb heat too quickly and therefore potentially damage the oven’s components as well as the boards that we’ll need to solder, we decided to wrap them up using the aluminum foil that we got from nearby grocery store. These aluminum foil will reflect the heat from coming directly to the bricks and thus will help the oven heats up faster.
Finally the stuffed oven with the aluminum covered bricks looks as below:
After that, we did some testing to check whether or not this set up would improve the oven’s performance overall. The new temperature graph is collected from the RoastLogger program is shown below:
