New Before and After Section

The Before and After progression montages I put together for a couple of our plates have proved quite popular, so I've decided to make a dedicated page for these progression shots:

Before And After

I will  annotate the progressions with details of how the effect was achieved if there is something special about the piece.

(Mostly) Solar-powered Kiln

This morning I decided to take a peek at my PG&E account to see what my electricity bill will look like with running our Paragon Benchtop 16 Kiln all day every day.

We installed solar panels on our roof last year, and we consistently generate more than we use (except in the three winter months), so I was hoping that the kiln wouldn't rip a huge hole in my bank account.

Here's the Smart Meter readings from the week before and after we got the kiln:

The change is quite obvious. Before we ran nice overages pretty much every day, generally around -13 kWh per day. After, we are in the red, around 8 kWh on fusing days and around 5 kWh on slumping days.  

Each run of the Kiln takes about 15 - 20 kWh, which translates into around 80 cents at 4 cents per kWh. With the solar panels, it's half that in the summer. In Winter, when we aren't generating overages, the cost will be higher, but it doesn't look like it will break the bank.

With both of us working, I'm anticipating that we won't be running the kiln quite as often as we did in the first week - so it's likely that we will just break even on the electricity cost. Which means that our studio is (almost) solar powered! 

Some Before and Afters from the Second Kiln Run

The second Fusing Project yielded a couple of nice plates.

Here are the before and after shots. From left to right, original layout, after fusing, after slumping.

Creating a Home Glass Studio

It's been a busy week since we brought home our new kiln from the Bullseye Kiln Sale on Saturday. We got the Paragon Benchtop-16, a small home-size kiln that plugs into a standard outlet.

The next step was cleaning out the garage and figuring out where the kiln should go - after some trial and error we came up with a decent preliminary setup:

There are still lots of improvements we'd like to make - for one, the work surface is not entirely level - but for the moment we decided to work with this for a while to see where the pain points are before throwing more money at it.

We pre-fired the kiln overnight, which led to a small scare - in the morning, the controller displayed an error message. We figured out what had gone wrong fairly fast though - the final stage in the schedule specified a target temperature of 80 degrees, too close to the room temperature of 76 degrees, which confused the controller. To avoid that failure, I now always specify an ending temperature of 90 - 100 degrees.

Next came the first trial run. We primed and dried the kiln shelf, and spent a happy afternoon assembling a variety of small fusing projects:

Programming the kiln is relatively easy, but we were happy that we went to the How to Program Your Kiln session at Bullseye, which saved us a lot of nerves and tedious manual reading. We used the sample fusing schedule from the class, and a looooong night later this was the result:

Some of the small jewelry pieces came out nice enough to put up for sale, so they are available on Etsy now. The larger pieces taught us a few things about sizing (cut the piece to less than the size of the mold, it will expand slightly).

Overall, we were pleased with the first experiment, and quite ready to do another!