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Comment by _trampeltier

2 days ago

Some years ago, I helped with battery load tests in a nuclear power station. The constant test load was just a big (~500kW) heater. We burned the battery energy for 5 hours. So it's easy possible to do such things.

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_trampeltier

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horsawlarway  2 days ago

Exactly this.

And the same thing for residential scale is literally just a ceramic space heater running at ~1500w.

They're dirt cheap, usually have temp safety checks built in, work on a residentially sized circuit, and are available everywhere.

I needed a cheap and consistent load to do LFP battery testing, and I could spend $5,000 for a real test unit, or $21 for a ceramic heater that will do basically the same thing.

If you've already got the monitoring for the batteries/inverters, a heater is a GREAT load choice.

  • petertodd  2 days ago

    HAAS CNC mills are famous for using electric stove elements for the spindle brake resistor: https://www.reddit.com/r/CNC/comments/1es1d01/someone_didnt_...

    I'm not sure that this really is a completely off-the-shelf stove element. But obviously, the technology is basically identical to what you'd have on your stove.

    • _trampeltier  2 days ago

      It is cery common for Frequency Inverter for AC Motors to have a break resistor. It's expensive to push energy back to the grid with from an inverter. So in most case just a break resistor is used. Just if you break a lot and a long time it is worth to buy an inverter who can do it. If you have multiple axis in a machine, often they are coupled with DC, so the break energy is used by another drive.

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