Knowledge Base

Choosing a heating element comes down to five questions: what you are heating, how hot it has to get, how the heat reaches the work, how much power the job needs, and what the sheath has to survive. Answer those five and the catalogue narrows to one or two types.

Sizing a heating job starts with one sum: the energy needed to lift a known quantity by a known number of degrees, divided by the time you will allow. This page does that arithmetic for a batch in a tank and for a stream that keeps flowing, and says plainly what the figure leaves out.

Watt density is the power an element carries divided by the surface it carries it on, in watts per square centimetre. It is the number that decides how long a heating element lasts, and the one most often missing from an order. This page works it out and checks it against your medium.

The eight families of heating element side by side: what each one heats, how hot it runs, how it mounts, and the one thing that most often goes wrong with it. Read across a row to see whether a type suits your job, and down a column to see how the families differ.

The questions people ask most often about industrial heating elements: how they work, why they fail, how to measure the one you already have, what to send when you ask for a price, and which page of this site answers the question you are really asking.

Longer written pieces about heating elements, how they fail, and how to look after them.