I just bisque fired some pieces in a little electrical furnace I borrowed from work. The thing is a rather tiny tabletop electrical furnace which really heats up bloody fast.

I had to visit the damnable thing every hour or so to punch in different setpoint temps (it does not feature programmable ramp functionality) to step it up. I found myself upping temps any time I walked past it in smaller chunks just to make the temp change more gradual.

The thing can probably climb at 100F/3min up to 1000F, then slower, probably easing down at 50F/3min when it's passed 1800F.

It's FAST, crazy fast compared to the firing schedules I've looked at for conventional kiln work.

I'm not that surprised really. It's so small it only could accommodate one big coffee mug per load. Still, it's got a power rating around 1.5kW which is huge considering that a much bigger kiln might only be up around 5kW.

The power per surface area of these little kilns is crazy high compared to a more common kiln.

Anyways: Do kiln firing cycles really have to be around 10hrs long? I can see that one needs to allow time for uneven heating/expansion to even out so your work doesn't crack, but if your kiln could reach a cone 04 bisque in 4hrs, would you have a heap of cracked stuff if you ran things that fast?

Are small Paragon tabletop kilns run just as slowly as a much bigger octagonal kiln?

Reason I'm asking is that I am considering building myself a smallish "research" kiln. I'm good with building stuff and can configure control systems. If I could run a significantly faster firing schedule to make cone 6-8 stuff in a kiln with fairly high power to chamber volume ratio, I'd probably run the crap out of a small kiln running goofy experiments with glazes etc.

Any one run the snot out of a small kiln to see how a glaze turns out faster?