Obviously the proper approach is to research the components you are planning to use obtaining reliability info eg, MTBF, expected number of cycles data and so on from the manufacturer and then find a supplier that will sell the selected devices to you at reasonable markup. Now what you consider a reasonable markup depends on what you need from the supplier. If all you need is the part then it should obviously be smaller than if you need the extensive customer support that Auberins (or whatever it is) supplies. That guy will spend hours on the phone with a poet explaining to him how to install one of their controllers in his espresso machine. I'm not kidding about this. A poet type friend of mine tried to do this conversion (but wound up coming to me with a box of parts).
Kal may well get the last laugh. Be patient. Two yrs isn't that long. I would hapily pay $1500 for a third and fourth 9 (reliability 99.99% instead of 99%) as IMO the bitterness of a component failure in the middle of a brew exceeds the sweetness of saving a few hundred (even 15 hundred) bucks on cheap components.
You may, with your cheap components, experience multiple failures in your next brewing session. Or you may go 20 yrs and hundreds of brews without. We are dealing with probabilities here and so we cant predict what actually will happen. All we can do is improve the odds by selecting more reliable stuff (which, surprise, surprise tends to cost more). Even that is no guarantee as reliable stuff fails too - it just takes, on average, longer.
I know all this falls on deaf ears to those that don't understand probability theory. If I were running the school system in the US it would be mandatory Readin, Ritin, Rithmetic and Probability theory. Being innumerate in the latter just grants the government, politicians, purveyors of cheap junk and others the ability to pull the wool over the public's eyes over and over again.
