What I’d do differently

[Islandboy85]

1. Use connectors with no less than 4 pins. The ability to tie shielding ground to a pin or add more wires without having to add more holes to the enclosure is a big deal. PT100 probes take up 3 wires. Float switches take up 2 wires. Say you had your HLT HERMS and a safety level float to protect the element, you could make a wire harness leaving the control panel just for the HLT. It would have 8 wires, and terminate at two temp sensors, and one float switch. There are some fantastic cannon plugs with 8-12 pins much cheaper than a bunch of XLR connectors.
2. Only use flange mounted connectors or round connectors that aren’t an unusual shape. I had XLR connectors that required notching in three spots for them to fit in the hole. It was a lot of extra work. Keep this in mind when buying yours.
3. Run your connectors through the removable plate on the enclosure. If you ever have to remove the wiring from the enclosure after it is built it’s easier to do that than remove a bunch of soldered connections or cut tie straps, etc.
4. Use DIN breakers as much as possible. I have some 38mm fuses for the elements and 110 bus. They can be expensive if you blow them. For low current fuses for things like your controllers regular glass 1/4inch, 5mm, 6mm etc fuses are fine. Look in your area to see what is available. Score you buy your fuse holder though. Keep spare fuses on hand too so you don’t have a ruined brew session.
5. Build the enclosure length wise. Having a DIN rail running the long way on the enclosure would have made routing wires easier and cleaner for my particular design.
6. I used cheap screw on main power contractors, and element contractors. Although I saved a lot of money not having these be DIN rail it took up a LOT more space.
7. Terminal strip. Same as 6.
8. I also used standard type of twist-lock wall outlets to save in cost vs the round type meant for enclosures. This took up a little more space, but if you want more compact than spend the money.
9. Don’t take forever to build it buying parts a little bit at a time. If you have issues with parts you bought a year ago you’re screwed.
10. Buy a big heatsink. Ebay has blemished and cutoff pieces cheap. I wish I’d got a bigger one initially.
11. Don’t buy plastic gland-nuts for your main power cord. Spend a few extra dollars in a metal one, and preferable one with a strain relief too so you don’t have to doctor it up to prevent it from pulling through. Some of the cheaper gland-nuts do not crap as tight as you and I might think they would. Trust me on this. If you are not needing a portable control panel by all means hard wire it with the proper conduit.
12. If you don’t have a bunch of sheetmetal tools, space to make noise and a mess, or the skills definitely consider one of the pre punched models (custom orders available) from places like Auber or The Electric Brewer. There’s a lot of work to get it to look and function just right. Granted I’m anal retentive due to having worked on airplanes where everything had exacting tolerance, so your mileage my vary.