So I started smelting down some of my pewter I've been collecting over the past couple weeks. Since it doesn't stink or smoke like smelting wheels weights, I was doing in on my casting bench I have set up in the garage. It's a cheap $11 coil hot plate I got on Amazon, 1100 watts. I was using a 8 inch cast iron skillet. The coil is about 5 1/2 to 6 inches across, this may be my issue. Melted the pewter fine. Problem was maintaining a hot enough temp. Had the thing on high, but had a ring around the endge of the skillet about 1/4 inch with solid pewter. Also my SS ladle had issues keeping hot enough to keep the alloy from constantly sticking to it. Same when I went to my Lyman cast iron ladle. Seems like the hotplate would run a few minutes, then shut off for a couple minutes allowing the alloy to cool a bit. Had to keep using a propane torch to keep my ladle hot and melt the outter ring that kept forming. In all, I did get 40 ingots made.....have enough pewter to prob do another 60 or so. Just a pita trying to work with that setup. So does that hotplate just suck, and I should grab a propane camp stove for small scale smelting or what? Read that many use those cheap hotplates with no issues. Not a good experience with mine. Should work fine to preheat molds and ingots, just not so much with smelting anything.