Did you know that the inspiration behind the TAP Kiln Controller came from my experiences owning a glass studio? We set out to develop the kiln controller I’d want for my own glass studio – with intuitive touchscreen controls for programming your kiln, the ability to save an unlimited number of firing schedules, and the ability to remotely monitor and manage all of your kilns.
These features make TAP Kiln Controllers the perfect option to make glass studio management more streamlined and efficient.
Below are tips for managing your glass studio, as well as ways TAP makes life easier for glass studio owners, managers, teachers, and students.
Tips for Managing Your Glass Studio
While glass is an art, managing a glass studio is a business. That means that organization, efficiency, optimizing costs, and minimizing expenses become important considerations for long-term success.
- Have a faster process for onboarding students.
- Spend less time managing or recreating firing schedules.
- Have a way to efficiently manage and monitor all of your kilns.
- Calculate your firing costs to more accurately price classes, work, and studio time.
- Take a smarter approach to maintenance to minimize kiln downtime.
- Use kiln safety features to protect your studio and your equipment.
- Provide more personalized support for your students.
Throughout the rest of this article, we’ll be sharing tips for each of these steps.
1. Quickly Onboard Glass Studio Students
Whether you’re onboarding new students or renting out studio time, faster onboarding leads to more profitability. Having a smooth, efficient onboarding process will help make first-time customers into long-time customers, while reducing time costs for you and your instructors.
Outside of using online systems to help manage class registration and scheduling, the glass kiln controller you use will have a major impact on your students’ experience.
Kiln controllers by most manufacturers have steep learning curves for creating firing schedules, monitoring progress, or making adjustments. TAP Kiln Controllers, on the other hand, are designed so that even unexperienced students or artists can immediately pick up TAP and begin programming their kilns.
In addition to reducing the learning curve, TAP provides a more engaging customer experience – which students will associate with your studio!
2. Spend Less Time Managing or Recreating Firing Schedules
Imagine if you could easily access your firing schedules for all your classes, glass techniques, and even for individual students – without ever having to take the time to recreate a schedule.
With the TAP Ecosystem, you can save an unlimited number of custom firing schedules with an unlimited number of steps. With full-text displays and custom names, you can name these schedules for specific classes, techniques, and students. That way, they’re always right at your fingertips.
In addition to helping streamline time costs for managing your glass studio, this leads to more consistency by reducing the opportunity for user error. Additionally, efficient firing schedule management creates a better customer experience by making sure classes always start smoothly and firing errors are minimal.
A video walkthrough of schedule creation and management for TAP II.
3. Efficiently Manage and Monitoring Your Kilns
As a glass studio owner, sometimes it feels like you need to be in a dozen places at once! From instructing students to monitoring kilns, there is a lot of multitasking.
The good news is that TAP Kiln Control Mobile makes multitasking a lot easier by empowering you to monitor all of your studio kilns from a single tablet or mobile device.
In addition to remote temperature monitoring and real-time push notifications for setpoints or schedule advancement, TAP Kiln Control Mobile offers full end-to-end remote kiln control.
This lets you make real-time firing adjustments, abort firings, or create schedules on the fly. You can also use Remote Start to remotely start your glass kilns and glass annealers from wherever you have cell signal. This feature is super convenient and empowers you to efficiently manage your glass studio with more peace of mind and less running around!
4. Price Your Work and Studio Time More Accurately
When it comes to kiln costs and pricing studio time, firing cost is an easy variable to overlook. However, in a studio setting, kiln firing costs add up!
TAP Kiln Controllers allow you to enter your kiln power rating and your municipality’s cost per kilowatt hour to easily track firing costs. Doing so helps you price your work, studio time, and classes more accurately, ensuring that no margins go unaccounted for.
This feature helps you see if your kiln is operating at peak efficiency – helping you stay ahead of potential maintenance concerns. Additionally, the TAP Ecosystem provides a host of features to optimize kiln maintenance that we’ll be talking about in the next section!
5. Optimize Kiln Maintenance to Minimize Downtime
Keeping your electric kilns operating at peak performance is an important part of successfully managing a glass studio. Few things are worse than when kiln failure ruins a project or a class!
Preventative kiln maintenance helps ensure that you replace components before they fail and cause disruption. TAP Kiln Control Mobile lets you enter manufacturer information about your elements, kiln relays, and thermocouples. Your controller then tracks usage of these components against their life expectancy so that you receive alerts right to your phone when it’s time to replace components.
Minimizing downtime and optimizing maintenance schedules help you manage your glass studio more effectively.
6. Protect Your Studio and Your Equipment
While conducting proper maintenance contributes to kiln safety, it’s important to consider your studio and your kilns as an investment. Like they say, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
Investing in a safety limit controller can help protect your kilns in the case of relay failure. Plus, even if you’re not ready to upgrade your studio kiln controllers yet, you can use TAP Monitor to remotely monitor kiln temperatures and provide automatic safety shutoff when you wire TAP Monitor to a redundant safety relay.
Investing a little bit upfront in kiln safety can help prevent major expenses down the line.
7. Provide More Personalized Support for Your Students
Finally, a big part of what keeps students coming back to your studio is trust in your expertise. They want to feel like you’re helping them truly understand the glass art firing process. Being known as a knowledgeable, supportive teacher enhances your brand reputation and helps your studio grow from word of mouth.
While experience is the best teacher, using advanced diagnostic data can help you pinpoint exactly what students are doing right or wrong. With the most advanced electric kiln controllers (like TAP!), you can export firing logs and error logs to your desktop and look at firing graphs to identify technical or schedule-creation issues that impacted projected outcome.
Being able to explain to students why they got the outcome they did – as well as how to improve – is a great way to personalize the support you provide to your students.
Are You Ready to Take Your Glass Studio to the Next Level?
If you’re looking to upgrade your studio kilns to the most advanced kiln control solution, SDS Industries is running a special promotion for glass studio owners and managers who are ready to upgrade!
Click the link below to get 15% off when you upgrade your glass studio!
Modernize Your Glass Studio
Upgrade your glass studio kilns with the industry’s most advanced, easy-to-use glass kiln controllers.
The TAP and TAP II Controllers by SDS Industries provide glass artists with intuitive touchscreen controls, PID-driven precision, and the ability to name, save, and access an unlimited number of firing schedules with an unlimited number of steps. That means that you can easily save, access, and execute the firing schedules for all of your glass projects – without having to dig through your kiln notebook or look up schedules online.
With integration to the TAP Kiln Control Mobile app, you will be able to monitor your projects in real-time, receive real-time alerts, and enjoy remote kiln control through your smartphone or tablet!
We invite you to explore our selection of programmable kiln controllers, standalones, and conversion kits on our online store. You can also purchase TAP Digital Controllers or TAP Controlled Kilns and Heat Treat Ovens through one of the following distributors:
- Evenheat
- Hot Shot Oven & Kiln
- Mobile Glassblowing Studios, LLC
- Jen-Ken Kilns
- Kiln Frog
- Sheffield Pottery
- Delphi Glass
