Coffeepot Sous Vide – not yet.

When you are hacking, its good to document success and failure.  Now when I first heard of sous-vide, I rushed out and to purchase my hand vacuum pump and a box of vacuum bags.  This part was perfect. But the coffeepot has exceptionally poor temperature control.  You can have any temperature you want if it is 170 Farenheit. The first result was alright but I wouldn’t serve it to company.

I attempted to build a temperature controller with one of those light dimmer switches  figuring that the heating element in the hot tray part of the coffeepot worked the same as a lightbulb. 

The dimmer switch looked pretty and worked to dim a light but had no effect on the temperature of the coffeepot which either held 170 or shut off.  I naturally took the bottom apart and built a jumper to bypass the thermostat and the control circuit to no avail. Once again it either held 170 or shut down.

At this point I quit on modifying the internal circuits and try a different approach.  The light dimmer cost me under $15.00 so it was not an expensive failure.  Certainly not the level of BP in the Gulf.

Tags: sous vide