After writing this post I will go back to heating my Sunset Duster- which is being too lazy to go all the way up to 10, but I am at 7 so a good portion of the work is done. Yay.
A level often can't provide the necessary heat required to level up a T3 item- such as Sunset Duster-. A heat-rich level will fill a clean heat meter to nearly halfway, and the next level will provide the same amount, two nearly halfways resulting in a nearly full, but not full.
The problem is, nearly full causes a lot of heat from the next level and time to go to waste. Let's say each level takes 10 minutes to complete, and provides 49% heat- the progress from level A to B should look like this:
49%(10 min)+49%(10 min)+2%(10 min)=100%(30 min)+96?% of the heat wasted from last level
If the game would round the heat up when it is nearly full, which is my suggestion by the way, we don't live in such a utopic world yet:
49%(10 min)+49%(10 min)+2%(free)=100%(20 min)+no heat wasted
Voila.