Electronic – Question based on rotary potentiometer and resolution

I am surprised that you cannot find a rotary encoder good to one degree, but I do not know a whole lot about them. A 10 to 1 gear train can improve the resolution by a factor of 10. Or a stepper motor can be used as a rotary encoder with 360/(steps per rotation) accuracy. A 1.8 degree stepper is almost there.

Yeah, so this post of mine is very dead - and I hate to ressurect it except for the fix I opted for. It's nearly fall again, so it's been a while since I messed with it, but if I recall properly, I used a 20 amp circuit breaker like a toggle switch since I didn't have any other AC switches. The heater originally had, like I said, an off/high/med/low switch, and a potentiometer/rheostat/whatever for more fine tuning. I just wired the heater together as "High" and then to the circuit breaker. It was something like 1 wire was low, 2 was med, and all the hots wired together was high. (As I'm reading what I'm saying, 20 amps seems awfully high, but I guess since it plugs into the wall, it actually has another breaker associated with it.) Anyway, this wizardry surprised the heck out of me that it actually worked and I think I actually learned something that day. Thanks again to my absolute favorite Stack Exchange community.