Fig. 77
6. Electric Broilers are merely hot plates, generally corrugated to conduct off the melted fat. One that we examined had a switch for three heats: low, requiring 360 watts—costs 3.6 cents per hour; medium, requiring 600 watts—cost 6 cents per hour; high, requiring 1280 watts—cost 12.8 cents per hour.
7. Electric Oven.—This one has double walls to retain the heat and has two large hot plates, one on the bottom and one on the top. It is large enough to hold four loaves of bread. It required 1520 watts for 40 minutes to heat it to the baking temperature and one hour to bake the bread. Hence the cost of the electricity is about 25 cents, about what the bread would cost in the market.
8. Electric Incubator.—This is simply a well-ventilated oven warmed by an electric hot plate and automatically controlled so that it keeps a constant temperature of 103 degrees. Under these conditions chickens hatch from hens' eggs in three weeks. An incubator for 5 dozen eggs was found to take 25 cents' worth of electricity for the whole process of incubation.
9. Electric Toaster.—The wire coiled up in sad irons and hot plates becomes hot enough to scorch cloth and paper, and even set fire to them if they come in direct contact. We proved this by opening the iron and touching paper to the wire while it was carrying the current. We also lighted a cigar by touching it to the wire. Electric toasters have the hot German silver wire simply covered by a screen.
Fig. 78
10. Electric Cigar Lighters ([Fig. 78]).—The one we examined hung by a flexible cord from the chandelier. It had a small disk on the side which contained a lot of fine wire covered by perforated mica. The wire became red hot when the push button in the handle was pressed. It took half an ampere of 110-volt current, and operated only while the button was pushed. As near as we could calculate it cost .0003 of a cent to light a cigar.