Hi everyone, I want to share that I nearly had an electrical fire this past weekend. At the end of my brew day when I was heating up cleaning water, smoke started coming out of my control panel and it smelled intensely of burned plastic. The SSR that controls my kettle was burning. After investigating, it became apparent that I didn’t take all the necessary steps to connect the output wires to the SSR properly. I did not use terminals, but just screwed the stranded wire into the connection on the SSR. Over time, the wire deformed and came loose. This resulted in increased contact resistance which turned the wire into a heater. The insulation burned, as did the SSR. When building your control panel, make sure you use terminals to connect your wires!
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Did you use flexible/stranded wire?
With stranded wire, you should always crimp. A cable ferrule or an eye lug. Stranded wire is not compatible with screw terminals.
That was precisely the problem. I hope the community can learn something from my mistake!
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I’ve terminated all my wires with something like this :
https://www.amazon.com/Wire-Ferrule-Kit/s?k=Wire+Ferrule+Kit
There is no such thing as an over engineered brewing controller…