Power and Safety Controls for My Clothes Iron.

This is how I made a control system for my clothes iron. Sounds like overkill eh? This controller does 2 things:
1 reduce the power usage from 1200watts to 120watts. That's one tenth the original usage!
2 safety timeout of the iron in case someone forgets to turn it off.

Read on for how I did this!

This wall timer I modified heavily from its oem form. This mod I did years ago so my apologies on no details on it. Basically I put an external pushbutton switch onto the 5min button. The last pic shows the modified and original timers.

I drilled appropriately sized holes and threaded in the pushbutton switches. Contact cement was used to stick the modified timer onto the lid of the pvc enclosure box.

Once assembled, the lcd display of the timer will be visible.

The 3000watt pwm dimmer is powered from the output of the timer and allows the clothes iron to use far less power. Again I used contact cement to stick it in place.

I used a two prong receptacle as the output since my clothes iron, like most, has no ground pin.

The neutrals are all tied together. The live input was sent to the common of a pushbutton switch. The normally closed of that switch was sent to the input of the timer. The timer output was connected to the input of the pwm dimmer.

The dimmer output is wired to the output receptacle.

A little over 120watts is good by me!

I screwed on the lid then wrote text on each pushbutton. Finally I put double sided tape on the back of the pvc enclosure box.

If I want an extra 5 minutes then I just need to press the start button again before or after the timer expires. Really user friendly!

Here is my nifty new controller for my clothes iron. I will enjoy reduced power consumption on my off grid home power system and also a safety timer to turn off the iron after 5 minutes.

I hope this instructable has been helpful.