Control Panel (Part 1)

Electric Brewery Control Panels are available for order completely assembled and tested as well as in kit form. For complete details see our Products page.

The control panel houses the lights, switches, and controls that we use to monitor and control our brewing process.

It's a 100% custom unit designed and built by us specifically for our brewing setup using mainly industrial-grade components.

The control panel was by far the most complex part of our brewery to design, as just about every part of the brewing process has an impact on the control panel.

All brewing process decisions had to be made prior to designing the control panel to ensure that the panel included the features we needed, worked well ergonomically, yet would remain flexible enough to allow for (optional) future changes.

What sort of changes? For example, while our brewery today is based on the HERMS (Heat Exchanged Recirculating Mash System) principle, the use of three discrete PID controllers and one large heat sink provides us with the flexibility to convert the control panel to control a RIMS (Recirculating Infusion Mash System) setup in the future if desired. While we don't foresee this happening (we're ecstatic with the setup today), having this flexibility without having to completely rebuild the control panel from scratch is certainly welcome.

Once the control panel was designed and parts were chosen, the actual assembly was fairly straight forward. (At more than 200 hours, documenting the control panel assembly took considerably longer than the actual building).

 The control panel houses the lights, switches, and controls that we use to monitor and control our brewing process:

The pumps, temperature probes, and heating elements connect to the underside of the panel. All cables are detachable and feature locking plugs or connectors to avoid accidental disconnection. (Some of the cables are quite heavy).

The pumps and heating elements use female receptacles, while the 30A/240V main power input uses a male receptacle. This is done for safety reasons as it ensures that live AC power will never be available on either the plug or receptacle if something is disconnected by accident.

The temperature probes use female receptacles and are extremely low voltage DC. There is no safety concern if a temperature probe is disconnected during use.

We connect cables to the control panel using plugs, connectors, and receptacles:

All cable receptacles are located underneath the control panel: 

 Considerable time was spent designing a layout that is balanced and works ergonomically:
 

We received assistance from our resident Master Electrician while assembling our control panel:

Instructions for building the control panel are split into multiple articles.

In this first part we'll show you how to prepare the enclosure and install the various external components. In the second part we'll install the internal components and provide wiring details. A last (optional) part provides details on adding a safe start interlock.