Hey guys, I'm new here and I want to make a 9 V lighter/igniter.
I used a short nichrome wire from our broken oven toaster, locked it in with two short bolts and hooked it up to a doorbell switch since its hard to find a proper small switch where Im from. I used a 9 V battery to power it. When i turned it on it did feel warm but the nichrome wire didn't turn red hot.
Is there anything wrong that I'm doing? Should I turn the nichrome wire? I was hoping to used a straight nichrome wire instead of using loops. Am I using the wrong kind of wire? I'm using 0.30mm^2X2C speaker wire. Should I up the power by using two 9 V batteries?
Best Answer
'A 9v battery' is probably woefully under-powered to drive the wire you have, assuming you mean the usual PP3 size.
Toaster wire will usually require a current in the low amps ballpark to glow red. A PP3 battery is good for low tens of mA continuously, low hundreds of mA if short-circuited, and is quite inadequate.
If you want to try two PP3 batteries, then putting them in parallel to increase the available current would give you a slightly less bad solution, but still be unlikely to make the wire glow. Once you're up to several dozen parallel PP3s, you might hope for success. However, a more appropriate battery type or power supply would be better.