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Ralph Mowery Ralph Mowery is offline
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Default Sunbeam Electric Blankets Keep Failing


wrote in message
...
I took one apart to attempt a repair. I was expecting to find a small
single heating wire fed power at the two ends and maybe a break in the wire
or a bad safety device.

But I was surprised to find instead a 2 conductor type of wire that was fed
power across the two wires. Apparently the wire contains some special
resistive material that connects across the two conductors and heats up all
along the wire. In an analogy it is like parallel christmas lights
instead of series. Also I think the material is self adjusting such that if
a local piece of the wire gets too hot, the resistance goes up and the heat
reduces at that portion only. It worked well when it worked, the heat was
even.

So i could find nothing wrong with the control or the wiring other than the
heating wire had a higher resistance across the two conductor compared to
the good blanket. So I can only conclude that whatever resistive material
the wire is made out of, it deteriorated over time. There is no single
place where the wire is broken, it is just deteriorated over the length.

So I thought i can fix this, simply get some of this special wire and
replace it. Well i have not been able to find this wire on ebay or any
other place that a consumer could buy say 20 feet.

If I get more information on this special parallel conductor heating wire,
I'll post it here.

If anyone else knows anything about it, let us know.

The wire looks like ordinary two conductor with white insulation. It looks
like ordinary two conductor wire, but it isn't it has some built in heating
stuff distributed throughout it's length that connects across the 2
conductors.



Interisting. When I was a boy we had electirc blankets around 1960 and one
went bad. It had some resistance wire in it like you would normally expect
to find.

While I have seen and used some of the wire like you are talking about for
pipes and also to heat other things I did not know they are making it in
electric blankets now.