Now we're cooking! A second heater, with the same specs as the first, was added to the kiln. This heater is powered from a separate 110AC circuit - a trip to the fuse box is necessary to figure out which outlets are a safe combination to use. Now the kiln gets nice and hot:

Just how hot does it get?

The highest recorded temperature was 1586 F (863 C or 1136 K). That's more than enough to melt aluminum, and it's at the low end of the acceptable range for firing clay. For this run, the kiln was loaded with a variety of trinkets we had made with some of the extra clay:

After firing, the clay objects turned a deep red. The red color apparently indicates a high iron content in the clay, which according to some of the readers, can cause problems for the nichrome heater wire. So I may need to think about ways to insulate the nichrome from the bricks for long term use...

As an aside, the extra heater wiring was installed with the help of some clay bead insulators: