The Good, The Bad & The Ugly

I spent several weeks working up a new system for BIAB indoors. Panel finally wired up and ready to go. Flipped on the Main switch and success, flipped on the pump switch, excellent, flipped on the element switch and flash/bang/smoke. UGH

The Good - Suyi from Auber sold me some new SSR's at a great price. Both of my originals ones fried up. Also P-J helped out with a diagram for me, but apparently mine was fine as is.

The Bad - myself for ordering cheap EBAY china crap LED's. They sent me 3 LEDs which all looked identical, upon close inspection the one that actually fried was a 24 volt AC/DC version which is pretty much hard to notice unless you LOOK very closely at the small white lettering. My fault again for not examining everything first.

The Ugly - I ripped apart my entire control panel build because of this looking for the cause, since I was pretty sure I wired it correctly the first time. Now I have to rebuild and figured I might as well do so in a bigger box so I can more easily diagnose the problem next time. Another $100 + in parts to get this done.

This time I am going to use some Bryant heavy duty industrial switches with pilot lamps built in.

Check out the Illuminated switches from Sprecher & Schuh. They have a modular line with different rated contacts and led's and that are stackable and super easy to service ... look at the D7 line. You should be able to find a local distributer in Portland quite easily!

Make sure you fuse all major components. This will help save your wallet, as well as a major safety feature. You will still get the flash/bang, but no more smoke.

From my research, it would appear that the proper fuses for protecting an SSR would cost more than the SSR. Semiconductor Fuses are what is called for. Pump & PID are on fuses and were not harmed in this disaster.

I've seen 30-50 A Semi fuses for between $7-9 (Allied or Digikey I think. I don't know how much your SSR was, and you would still need to purchase a holder for the fuse. Regardless of whether you choose to use Semi fuses, i would still fuse the SSR from a fire safety aspect.