I ordered one the day they were announced. Here in the Arizona desert my tap water is 95f or more during the summer. So I’ve been playing mad scientist mixing refrigerated and room temp water. With this thing I’ll just pour refrigerated water into my dishpan and set it for 68. I’ve also just started doing C41 and would like to do E6 as well so it should help with those a lot too.
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I think that's pretty neat. I will wait for the rave reviews. If it will keep a water bath 38C and hold it steady would be a perfect match for a small tank. If it goes down to 20 or even 25C ,it wouldn't be hard to put a bit of ice in a plastic bag and float it in the bath for required time. My darkroom rarely gets above 22C in the summer. That is until I crank up my color processor and Ilfospeed dryer. The dryer is 1500 Watts of quartz heating elements
I received mine a couple days ago and broke it in by heating a water bath for processing a roll of 35mm color negative film. It worked like it was supposed to. The dishpan I was using wasn't really deep enough so I'm on the lookout for a better container.
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What I have wanted to know with the sous-vide and now this, is if the water has a temperature gradient in a larger water bath, between the unit and the other side of the tank. My 3-tank water bath for 4x5 dip-and-dunk processing is fairly large (each tank is 2.5L) and I am worried the first chemicals on one side will be different temperature than the last chemicals on the other. I currently use an Arkay heater/recirculator and I am fine with it, but since I've already had one die on me I am sure my current one won't last forever, so I would be interested in this for the future. It's also smaller and easier to use than the Arkay with its water lines running up from the unit, under my processing area.
I use the kitchen appliance and it works great. I also chill my water to 68F no problem and use gallon jugs of cooled water I keep in the water bath to rinse. I am looking at getting a large volume chiller and a high end water heater/recirculator (like a high end fish tank heater) My sous-vide keeps my water bath quite even for hours and hours too.
The only advantage I see is the ability to cool the water down to 32F.
My bottles of chems were in the refrigerator and the water bath started at about 75f. It took a while for a thermometer in the dev bottle to read 102, but that was no surprise. The thermometer at the other side of the dishpan read a bit above 100.Originally Posted by Corran
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Thanks for the report. Do you mind telling me about how big your dishpan was? My dip-and-dunk bath is 14 x 10 inches roughly, and I keep the water level at about 4.5 or 5 inches. It probably holds around 3 or 4 gallons, between the bath water and chemistry. Truthfully, I haven't measured for a gradient myself but with the amount of water circulated by the Arkay I highly doubt there is any (and you can independently position the in/out tubes to get more even circulation). I measure the temp of the first dev / color dev and process based on that temperature, as the water in the tank settles just a little higher than the actual chemistry usually.
I have checked my container, holds about 10 gallons I think, maybe 8. I set the sous-vide to 104.5 and my 1 gallon water bottles and chemicals all stay at 102 regardless of where in tank. It circulates the water pretty good.
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