Which is an appropriate but simple electrical circuit to reduce the energy (power) consumed by a heating coil which has an AC feeding without generating an asymmetric load (large DC component, e.g. with a diode)?
I know that this would make it cooler.
Some heating coils consume a lot of power (kilowatts), so a simple resistor in series would be a bad idea (difficult to cool). A capacitor in series is also very easy, but way to expensive for the two months application I want it for.
I think what I need is a kind of dimmer, a thyristors or triac. But I want to have a fixed rating, it doesn’t have to be adjustable. Of course I have no problem if it is adjustable if the electrical network is still easy to understand and to build.
E.g. if my power source is 230 V AC, 50 Hz. The heating coil has a power consumption of 2300 Watts at this voltage but I want it to consume only 1400 Watts, which parts are most recommendable and how would the circuit look like (or what is it’s name, I could then search for it).
PS: This is the second attempt to ask this question. The first one was to specific on my dishwasher and inverter, but also got some interesting answers.
Answer
As I need this power reduction only for one or two months (until my 3000 watts inverter is repaired and shipped to me again), I used the cheapest method, which was an electric waffle iron I already had, and which was broken in two parts – but the heating still works.
So I used this waffle iron as a resistor, where the iron itself is the heat sink for the attached heating coil of he waffle iron. It gets quite warm and smells like waffles (because I never cleaned the broken waffle iron) when the dishwasher heats. But it works, and it cost me nothing, because I reused the cables and the screw terminals from the waffle iron.
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