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PID Controller

Adonaioc
edited February 2015 in Beginner's Talk

I want to leverage my electric brewery control panel to drive the heating elements in my still. Basically its a PID that you can set a percentage on, so if you set it for 80% it would cycle itself on and off so that 80% of the time its on. Would that give me enough control over be able to successfully run the still? I am thinking that as long as keep bumping it up little by little throughout the run to keep the flow steady I could get good results.

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Comments

  • grim

    As long as you can control the duty cycle directly and it's not driven by temperature set point you'll be fine. If you set the %, that's perfect, exactly what you need.

  • Adonaioc

    Excellent, the PID can do either manual percentage or auto cycle based on temp probe, but I typically use the manual percent setting for my Boil kettle so I figured that would work but I wanted to make sure I wasn't missing anything, thank you.

  • brewsmith
    edited February 2015

    I run the auber PID on my control panel and it works just fine. With a 5500w element and an 11-12 gal batch size I am typically running at 60-70% on spirit runs with a fair bit of reflux

  • CothermanDistilling
    edited February 2015

    Agreed, obviously the power depends upon the size of the boiler and the power of the element... I have about 3 years experience running one on a homebrew panel,. I think with a 4" dash and a 15.5 keg and 550W element I used full power during warmup, and 50-60% power during the run... I would not use the PID function on the heating element during any phase... use a PID on the cooling water.. here is my panel back when it was about 90% done

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_-u2YG1e-1g

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