Must be some electrical engineer in his blood. Pretty neat wiring work, and stuffing everything possible into each box. Well done, indeed. Neat is a good thing, and sure helps down the road for troubleshooting. Did you (are you) making any drawings for that as you build it? I'd bet there's more than one brewer out there that would pay pretty good money for one like it.
I love fabricating things as well, but just don't have the time yet. Still catching up on all the honey-dos that piled up in a 40 year career of engineering, fabricating, installing, and inspecting things for someone else. Never had time for my own projects. Now I do, except for the little problem of all the other higher priority projects it takes to modernize a 50 year old house and clear up a couple acres that have been feral for 50 years. You know, that business before pleasure thing.
But I get some pretty darn good ideas in this forum, that's for sure.
This thing will definitely give a lot more control over temperature since it's analog and not waiting for a min/max temp to occur and close a contact. Anything that uses binary inputs for control will naturally oscillate. Can't stop it. A good PID loop with a little bit of integral gain will/should control the temperature within a degree or two of setpoint quite easily, possibly closer depending on the resolution and full scale of the inputs. Now ya gotta do the graphics showing the volumes, piping, pump status, heater/chiller status, etc. etc. etc. One word. Wonderware. One of the best HMI packages I've ever seen. Might be a little pricy, though. Haven't looked at it lately, but put a lot of HMI systems in with it through my career. I'm watching this now.
