Greetings fellow nerds.
It's time for an update on my hotplate stirrers from last year.
In case you don't remember, i've had a lot of problems with my hotplate stirrers from missing parts, to blown circuits and finally to the biggest headache of all, a burned out heater element.
Everything else i could hack together or jerry rig a solution, but these elements were extremely difficult to replace as the parts aren't commercially available to individuals.
I made do with repairing the element by bridging the burned out sections with copper foil
but these elements were of such terrible quality that new burnouts would pop up elsewhere.
Finally I was left without any working hotplate stirrers.
Now i could have kept buying more hotplate stirrers but i was weary of burning even more money.
If these hotplate stirrers failed within a year, what was going to prevent any new purchase from also failing?
So I decided to bite the bullet and buy the heating elements as a business to business transaction with a chinese manufacturer.
The minimum order was 30 units for $500 and while i could have bought a whole new hotplate stirrer for that price,
I decided to buy the heater elements instead so i could be certain i had enough spare parts to last me for years to come.
A new hot plate stirrer could have failed within a year and i would have been forced to by yet another one.
At least with these elements, i could always swap in a new one and hopefully have more uptime for less cost.
Anyway I replaced my heating elements and the new ones worked perfectly.
But there was always the chance the elements could fail and if my hotplates were any indication.
Failure was a rather common occurrence.
So i said that i would track how often i needed to replace them and let you know in a year if these were quality elements.
Which brings me to today.
You've seen me abuse these elements for the past year in my videos and I have done all sorts of chemistry from making drugs to making sulfuric acid.
There is no more rigorous a trial for a hot plate stirrer than working non-stop in a chemistry lab.
So how did these elements fair.
For all hotplates combined i had repair and replace the elements a grand total of zero times.
The exact same elements you saw me put in last year are still the same elements i'm using now.
They never failed.
They're far better than the original elements that failed dozens of times and required numerous repairs.
In fact, hilariously enough, this low quality sci-basics brand hot plate had a controller failure.
The heating element itself lasted longer than the rest of the hotplate.
Granted, two quality elements is not statistically significant but i'm still very happy with my purchase.
Now i don't sing praises for a company too often, especially if they're not paying my selfish and greedy ass with a sponsorship.
But this chinese company, panshine heater, has earned my respect and future business if i should ever need it.
Which is kind of sad because of how durable these elements are and the fact that i already bought 30, i'll probably never need more.
They created a product that is better than the existing elements and seems to even be better than the rest of the hotplate stirrer.
An example of quality chinese engineering.
So looks like i'll be all set for hotplate stirrers for awhile.
Okay so moving on to other business.
Now i know everyone is wondering where i've been for the past month and how come there are no new videos.
I've actually been working very hard on the grignard reaction video but i've run into lots of problems and failures.
The grignards themselves are easy to make.
The problems largely stem from runaway thermal reactions and difficulties in processing the end products.
Nothing i can't handle, but it takes a lot of time to fix and redo them.
Most of them are in fact successful, but i've been redoing some so the don't look like trainwrecks.
So that's what i've been doing for the past month.
But don't worry, hopefully i'll get this finished before the end of this month or early next month at the latest.
Okay now I'm going to discuss a few things about patreon.
If you are not currently a patreon donator then you don't have to watch this.
In fact you can stop the video right now and spend the valuable minutes of your life doing something more productive.
So go on, shoo, out the door, scram, make haste and take care.
Are they all gone yet?
Okay, now i know a lot of you patrons don't follow my patron feed or read the patron messages
so i'd like to inform you that voting for projects is up.
Click on the link in the video description to go to the landing page for them.
You guys paid good money to be my patrons, enjoy the perks!
Okay, now for our last order of business, which is patron itself.
There has been some huge drama with patreon in past week with them rolling out a new fee structure.
To make a long story short they jacked up the fees and many patrons and creators left in disgust.
But the public outrage was great enough that patron has reverse their decision and have gone back to the old fee structure.
If you are one of the patrons that left then you can safely return and make your pledges.
Although i will still explore patron alternatives just in case they pull a fast one again.
Thanks and take care.