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I've been reading a lot about geothermal heating/cooling, which can be incredibly energy efficient. Compared to air-source heat pumps which use the air as a heat sink in the cooling process, ground-source heat pumps are typically 3x more efficient and actually deliver more cooling power than the...

Indeed

I'll actually be out of town next week. There's another interested party but if it doesn't work out with them I'll be in touch.

I've got a lot of old Grolsch-style swing top bottles that I'm getting rid of as I've moved to kegging. They've been sitting for a while and need a good cleaning plus new gaskets. I've found ~1Tbsp PBW and very very hot water plus an hour or so does a good job. Free to pickup for anyone in the...

That makes sense. When I wire it up, I’ll make one unswitched. Thanks for the advice again.

It’s mostly for the flexibility of an additional outlet. I’ve considered trying a two-vessel set up and this would allow me to run a second pump. This panel only has one element output of course so I’d build a small variable power source to run the second element - it would be a 1650-W element...

The top NC block controls the element coil and the bottom NO block controls the relay coil. The middle blocks are connected in series for the interlock. Thanks for your help again! I'm a physics teacher and I love problems that can be solved with out-of-the-box thinking. From a pedagogical...

Sure. This is the incorrect schematic: (The element firing LED has been omitted as well as the connection between the PID and SSR.) Here's the change I suggested in my above post:

Hey again, I realized I made a mistake in my circuit schematic. I had the boil contactor coil and relay coil in parallel which means the relay would have been activated regardless of the position of the 3-position selector and obviously that’s not the idea… So my question is if I can put the...

radioactive decay

Thanks for your response. That makes sense. At this point I’m working out the most efficient way to run wires throughout my panel and how to orient the different components. For contactors/switch blocks, does it matter which side is input and which side is output or are they engineering in a...

I was poking around on Auber's website and found this image of the guts of one of their BIAB panels. In this circuit, there's main power in -> main power contactor -> 30A breaker -> SSR -> element contactor -> element power out. In the panel schematic that I'm using, the SSR comes between the...

Ok great. Follow-up: Could a controller as I described above be powered by a 120V/15A circuit? I'm pretty sure that if you used an adapter plug to power this using a 120V/15A circuit, the pump wouldn't work. Am I correct that the pump would have to be connected to L1 instead of L2? That's...

Jumping into this thread to ask a question about the schematic in post #2... Could this panel design be altered in order to power a 120V system or a 240V system? My thought is to change the element power switch to a 3-position selector with two pairs of stacked NO and NC blocks. Turn the...

So doug293cz, I'm curious what you make of this controller from Brau Supply. It appears that the enclosure is metal, so perhaps the entire enclosure is acting as a heat sink? If it's only meant to output 15A to the heating element there'd be only 25% the heat dissipated from an equivalent SSR...

Also I found a circuit diagram here. Note that the circuit is fused - always a good idea. You didn’t mention having a fuse in your original post but that is definitely something to spend some money on. Most DIY control panel kits I’ve seen also include a main power contactor and a boil contactor...

I’ve mostly seen heat sinks mounted on the outside for 240V/30A control panels. If you don’t see a heat sink on the outside, my guess is there’s one on the inside. This heat sink can be mounted to DIN rail which is often found inside control panels. I don’t know enough about panel design to say...

That's good advice. The only reason I'm considering a DIY version is because I only brew 2.5 gal batches. With my current BK, there would be about 2" of coil above the surface of the wort. The goal is to achieve similar chilling efficiencies while scaling it down for my batch size. Looking at...

Agreed, Chikn. I like your idea of the caulking/epoxy putty. I think that could work well.

Looking at the Hydra and King Cobra, it looks like a reducer coupling is used to connect the 1/2" water-in/water-out tubing to the three 3/8" coils. Any idea how that could be duplicated DIY? I figure everything is silver soldered together, but you'd need some filler material to fill in the gaps...