It's very cold over here in Britain - just 50 miles north of me some roads and airports are currently closed due to overnight snow. In my patch, today has been a day of hailstorms and icy rain, and so I decided to make another 'hot box' to assist with box and frame gluing - as the glue I use requires a minimum of 10 deg C in order to fully harden. Although building a hot box is simplicity itself, I thought a pic or two might be of interest to anyone contemplating making one.
So - I started off with a very old busted chest freezer which has been employed for the last few years to store dry animal feed. After giving it a quick clean - this is what I discovered:
The size of this freezer just couldn't be more perfect - two brood boxes, or four nucs just fit along the bottom, and can be stacked three high. The area over the compressor will take one brood box on it's side, or two nucs. So that's seven brood boxes, or 14 nucs, or some seventy frames which can be warmed, and thus glued during winter, each day - far more than I will ever need.
And this is the heater I fitted - it's an amateur gardener's 50 watt soil warming cable - enough to warm 4 or 5 seed trays - tied-wrapped under some steel mesh which is supported by 1 inch battens, resulting in a fairly low profile heater.
The cable exits through the compressor compartment, and runs through hosepipe tubing in order to protect it from sharp edges where I drilled through the thin steel sheeting of the bulkhead side.
It's been running 'as is' for most of the day, and appears to have maxed-out at around 28-29 deg C (82-84 F). That's pretty-near perfect for my purposes, and without any form of control. The wattage could be halved of course, quite simply, by fitting a diode (common 1N400X series) into the plug.
Happy days ...
LJ