Stop Dealing with Cold Spots in Your Glass Tunnel Kilns
If you’ve ever worked with a long tunnel kiln, you know the frustration of “cold spots.” You use standard IR lamps, but they leave these annoying gaps. The result? Uneven heating and those heartbreaking stress fractures in your glass. It’s a nightmare. We decided to fix this by building custom infrared units that stretch over 2 meters. No gaps. Just one long, continuous blanket of heat. The struggle with length You can’t just stretch a quartz tube and call it a day. If you do, the electrical resistance goes haywire. You end up with lamps that burn out at the ends or just don’t get hot enough in the middle. To stop that from happening, we tweak the wattage and voltage. We push for a high-wattage output so the center of that 2-meter span stays just as hot as the edges. Just a heads-up: make sure your power supply can actually handle the load. You don’t want to be tripping breakers every time you power up. Making it actually work We use high-purity quartz because it can take the thermal shock without cracking. By laying these out in one long line, we get rid of that “striping” effect you see with shorter, staggered lamps. And since kilns are brutal environments, we use industrial-grade connectors. Wiring failures are the last thing you need when you’re mid-production. Plus, if you’ve already got a rig, we can usually match your footprint so the new units just drop right in. A few things to keep in mind Here’s the honest part: longer lamps are a bit more delicate. A 2-meter quartz tube can snap if your kiln frame vibrates too much or shifts. It happens. To avoid a disaster, we recommend using reinforced mounting brackets to keep everything rock-solid. One more thing. All that heat has to go somewhere. A continuous 2-meter array puts a massive load on your ventilation. If your exhaust isn’t beefy enough to handle the BTUs, you’re going to overheat your kiln housing. Check your fans before you flip the switch.