Give Your Old Steam Oven a Second Life with Custom IR Tubes
Ever notice how an old steam oven just starts to lose its edge? It takes forever to get back up to temp, or you find those annoying cold spots where the food just isn’t cooking right. Usually, the culprit is the heating element. Those old-school resistive coils are slow. They’re just not built for the speed we need today. We’ve found a better way: swapping those tired coils for custom infrared (IR) bulbs. Getting the power just right We don’t do “one size fits all.” We build these tubes to fit your specific oven’s footprint. Whether you need a weird length or a specific wattage, we match the power to the size of your oven. The beauty of IR is that it’s radiant heat. It doesn’t waste time warming up the air first; it hits the food immediately. It’s fast. Really fast. One quick heads-up, though: if you decide to crank up the wattage in a small oven, keep an eye on your control relays. You don’t want to overload your wiring and end up with a burnout. Tough glass, smarter heat Steam environments are brutal on equipment. That’s why we use high-purity quartz glass. It can handle the thermal shock without cracking. Depending on what you’re cooking, we can even add special coatings to the glass. This basically tells the heat exactly where to go, making it hit the surface of the food more aggressively. And don’t worry about a complicated install. We mostly use standard R7s or SK15 connectors. They just slide right in. You won’t have to tear apart your housing or rebuild the whole machine. A smarter way to retrofit Instead of dropping a fortune on a brand-new oven, you can just fix the part that’s actually failing. By using a custom IR bulb, you put the heat exactly where the food sits. Since IR heat is directional, you can finally kill off those cold spots for good. One pro tip: if you’re running a heavy steam cycle, double-check your seals. You don’t want condensation dripping straight onto the hot quartz, or the glass will shatter. Keep it dry, and these things will treat you right.