STC 3000 - Suitable for RIMS?

[Wonkydonkey]

A SSR is an ssr, it's really down to the rated power and if its a copy not up to the rated power.

And don't forget the heatsinks paste to make a good contact to your heatsink.

Btw I replied to your Rex thread

Cheers

[jaroporter]

if you went for the bundle you linked earlier then those cheapo SSRs are what i use - same 40A rating for a 3kw element too - rated to have plenty of cushion for less than adequate internal parts (will probably really only handle 16 or 25A ). have been working fine for me. i do also use a 12v pc fan over the heatsink just to help out but i already use 12V in my controller so it's no extra hassle.

[floydmeddler]

Cheers boys. All good then!

Build is back on

[Fil]

i ended up buying the sestos brand which is very similar in operation to the US brand Auber

Hey Fil,

I should have listened to you from day one!!! Bought a REXC100 bundle only to find out that it is incompatible with a PT100 probe. Ah well.

So... I bought a Sestos PID on your recommendation. Am I right in thinking that I can simply hook up the the SSR/heatsink that arrived with the REXC100?

Cheers

Yes as long as you have the ssr version of the sestos pid should be fine..

[floydmeddler]

Build is now complete. Thanks for all the advice folks.

Check it out here: viewtopic.php?f=6&t=80104

[McMullan]

Having worked with the STC and the REX controllers, i can share some experience. We had a failure rate of about 5% on the STC models (out of 120 units) , these were generally a fault with the measurement side, not the probes themselves but the PCB. They are on/off control, so for maintaining a temperature (say for mashing) the relay will be clicking on/off every minute or so. The issue then is the relay life. generally the relays are 100,000 or 300,000 operations, but these are not omron relays, but copies, so if you assume 50k. Now switching on load will bring that way down, perhaps to 1k to 10k operations. if during a brew it opens and closes 100 times, then you get 10 brews (for a life of 1k ops) or 100 brews (for a life of 10k ops).

A 5% failure rate is quite respectable, given the cost of the units. Also, 100 brews is probably what the average home brewer does over several years. An STC costs under a tenner. That's good value, in my mind.

[Kev888]

5% is a much a higher failure rate, on those terms, than I'd have expected from anecdotal evidence on the forum, thats quite a surprise.

I suppose 120 units would be a pretty small part of one production run, so it may not be statistically representative against the many thousands made. Or perhaps there has been less comment because generally users have installed these themselves, and so can replace them fairly easily. Certainly, there is rather less acceptance when a lot of money has been spent on something professionally pre-built and/or that needs to be returned for repair. These days not so many people seem to be going the DIY route, so reliability may become more significant.

[McMullan]

Modern electronics you really expect and need a failure rate in the 0.x% at worst and possibly 0.0x%.

Not for home-made wort. What you're demanding is something related to risks/costs. It's one of the reasons why those running projects, like clinical studies, don't source their kit from China via eBay. Think about it.