by Grimster » Tue Jun 24, 2014 3:22 pm
Hi guys, thanks for welcome call in. Happy to let you in on the info.
A good question Zac, and one which I will be able to fully answer in about 2 weeks ! But in the meantime, a background as to why we went this way.
After reading lots of forum posts (on temp control) here in past months a common theme we found was that having easy, but good and reliable control of your temps was important, either through heater element temps, condensor flow or reflux control. Given my background is in electronics engineering I found this was the first and easiest place to start.
We have a manual / auto selection on the control box for times we want to run the element full on, say during a vinegar run for cleaning, but also for when we want to control the temp during a wash run... with greater ease. The box provides us with the best of both worlds here. So spot on Mech.
Another common theme found in the forums was that there are so many variables in producing a fine drop, and given this problem, we felt having control over some of those variables was key to producing the same fine drop, every time. The PID and SSR combination will provide us with better 'temp' control in part during the main run, and then allow us to vary anything with some ease during the later tricky times when ABV's start changing all over the place.
Wil is nursing two 60L washes as we speak which will be ready for a run in the next 5-10 days so I'll look forward to giving some feedback on how it went, and how we managed.
Grimster.