Hi guys, first time posting so apologies if this has been discussed elsewhere or if I should be posting in a different topic area.
About me: I live in Australia. I work in robotics as a contractor design engineer.
The Brief: I am working on a project which requires casting metal parts from 3D printed molds, and sintering 3D printed metal powder objects. For this I need an electric muffle furnace which goes to 1700c and can hold a hydrogen atmosphere (luckily alibaba has them at a good price). This will be installed at an office which has only 240v 10A sockets.
A furnace with the specs I need requires 4kW of power continuously. Clearly a 10A socket at 240v can't do this. and even a 15A socket (which I dont have anyway) can't either (3600W).
So is there any practical way of getting 4kW of power (for up to 48hours, for some refractory metals, so generator is out) without having 3 phase installed?
My ideas so far are:
Idea 1: Couple 2 or 3 powerpoints together (each on separate circuits) into a single 20A single phase? I don't have much experience with AC power circuits but my intuition is telling me if I simply wire them together directly they would get out of phase and do something unpleasant and not work. Is there a specialised circuit I don't know about which is designed for this sort of thing?
Idea 2: take a feed directly from the distribution box, use high amperage cable, and install a 20A fuse. I imagine as long as the distribution box can handle 30A total (the furnace + other devices running concurrently) I dont see why this wont work. Also I dont know how to tell what the maximum current my distribution frame can handle; it isn't written anywhere obvious.
If anyone familiar can tell me why this wont work and if there is another way that will work, I would be very grateful
for the curious, this is the kind of furnace I'm talking about:
https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/1700C-laboratory-chamber-H2-hydrogen-CH4_62361982245.html?