Inkbird ITC-308 Temperature Controller Digital Thermostat for Home Brew Greenhouse Heater Heat Mat Tube Heater Reptile Vivarium

I bought my first Inkbird ITC 308 about a year ago after reading multiple recommendations on the home brewing forums and I put it to use controlling the temperature of my fermentation chamber (a converted fridge). It worked so well - basically you 'set it and forget it' - that I've bought a second unit to handle temperature control in my dispensing cabinet (kegerator) build. FEATURES The idea of the Inkbird is really simple to understand. You enter the temperature you want it to maintain and you place the probe somewhere for it to measure that temperature. You enter the lowest that you're willing to tolerate the temperature being off by and if the measured temperature falls below that point it will activate the socket marked 'heating' until the measured temperature reaches your ideal point. Similarly you enter the highest temperature you want to tolerate and if the measured temperature breaches it then it will activate the socket marked 'cooling'. All you need to do is plug a heating device into the socket marked heating and a cooling device (e.g. a fridge, freezer) into the socket marked cooling. It is not mandatory to have both plugged in at the same time, for example I don't need cooling in the depths of winter so I just plug the heater in. The Inkbird has a safety feature that allows you to specify the minimum time between activating the cooling socket. Fridges and freezers can be damaged if their compressors are cycled too quickly. This feature prevents such damage, and in the event of power loss it will assume that cooling was previously on and will not reactivate it until the safety time has run down - nice. Another nice feature is that it has a buzzer alarm for high and low temperature thresholds in case your heater gets stuck on I guess. I've never used that. You can also calibrate the thermistor probe by entering an offset if you find that it drifts over time. ACCURACY I have an ETI thermocouple with recent calibration certificate that I compared my ITC 308 units to. The first one was only 0.1C off, the second one was 0.2C off. Those differences are within the margin of error of the probes. That's rather impressive and of course once I'd entered the offset into the ITC 308's calibration feature the difference was zero. EASE OF USE Hold down SET. Cycle through the different options using up/down to enter the numbers. Hold down SET when you're done. All settings are remembered when the power is cut. PROBE CABLE LENGTH 2 metres. BUILD QUALITY It feels very tightly put together. All cables have tough rubber strain reliefs at the exit from the unit. There's a handy screw/cable-tie hole at the top. The plug is UK 3-pin. WARRANTY 12 months TIPS Use the lowest power heater you can get away with. If it's too powerful you'll get overshoot as the heater will still be hot long after the power has been cut. Try to measure what it is you want to control rather than the air around it. Again this will avoid constant cycling as the air changes temperature rapidly before whatever it is you're trying to monitor 'catches up'. SUMMARY I'm super happy with mine; I guess I must be if I came back for a second one and I echo the positive comments that the other home brewers are saying about the ITC 308.

The Inkbird 308 is an easy to use, plug in and go temperature controller that I got to supplement my current STC-1000 controller. I use both for home brewing, either holding a fermentation fridge at the right temperature, bringing strike water up to temperature or cold crashing. It has a few advantages over the STC, a) You can see the current temperature and the desired temperature at the same time. A few times I've used my STC to get strike water for the mash ready, then forgot to drop it down to mash temperature and basically killed the mash. b) It's easier to program than the STC and it can be done with one hand. The STC requires you to hold down one button while pressing another while changing settings - I know a brewer that has a problem with one of their hands that can't program the STC. The settings are also abbreviated to letters, e.g. ts for temperature set rather than just numbers 1 to 4. c) You can set the differential from the temperature you want separately for heating and cooling which really is great if your heating or cooling system causes swings. You might want it to start heating when the temperature is half a degree below your required temperature, but not want a cooler to kick in until it's 4 or 5 degrees over - the STC doesn't let you do that. d) The quality of the temperature probe wire is much more rugged and twice the length of my STC probe's and the replacement I bought. This may be because I bought a knock-off STC. I stick the probe to my fermenter under a wadge of blu-tak and just with reasonable flexing the wire shielding split next to the sensor. I didn't notice this and humidity got into the split and caused changes in resistance meaning I had to recalibrate it all the time. I thought the STC itself was broken before I tracked it down. e) It has a high and low alarm feature which I find useful when doing a mash. I don't have a good mash tun so I set the low alarm to 65c and when it goes off it lets me know to add a bit of hot water. f) It's plug and play! You won't run the risk of electricuting everybody by not knowing how to wire it up. g) It's plug and play #2! You won't risk eye and limb damage trying to Dremel out an aluminium hard drive enclosure to fit it into and all the sockets. Seriously, the sparks burnt my decent jumper when I made my STC enclosure, and the number of disks I went through was shocking. In the picture I've got them lying together but actually have the 308 and sockets mounted on the wall and it feels really solid. Overall even though it does the same job as my STC-1000 it does it slightly better and I sort of trust it more.

Why did I not find these sooner? I have been using heat pads along side a submersible heater for years, and the heat pads were not thermostatically controlled which meant that you were guessing with a timer, and having to check the temperatures several times a day. Now I don't! So glad that I found this device as it is a game changer when trying to keep a steady temperature. I have only had it a couple of days and already wonder how I did without one. Made in Germany, and seems to be of high quality. One tip when using on a home brew bucket is after taping the sensor to the outside of the bucket with masking tape, cover the whole probe with a thermal insulating material and tape this over the whole probe in order to insulate it from outside temperatures. I found that this made quite a difference to the accuracy of the sensor.

This was purchased to replace an old analogue type thermostat on a commercial food heater. However, to install the controller, the output sockets needed to be inside the cabinet so it meant having to disassemble the socket so that the cable could be passed through a cable gland in the panel. This required some desoldering and resoldering which was not an issue, however, whilst the item was apart, one of the plug prong recepticles just fell out (photo attached) it was supposed to be soldered onto the board but the solder had never been touched. I wouldn't like to say whether or not the recepticle was making enough contact with the board for it to be safe, but we had to solder it into place to be on the safe side. Anyway, after it was put back together and fully installed, it is working perfectly and the food warmer is maintaining a very accurate and consistent temperature all day long now.

I acquired this device to use in conjunction with a heatpad for temperature control of homebrew fermentation. The timer is relatively small and lightweight but with a clear LED display. The mains lead and sensor lead are usefully long but the twin heat/cool sockets are on a fairly short lead (which means it has to be close to the fermenter but that's not an issue for me). I taped the sensor to the outside of the vessel and covered it in thick insulation and that worked well. The instructions are slightly amusing but its not that hard to set up. I use it only for heating and its sensitive enough to heat on on/off cycles of 0.5degC. It has worked well when left to its own devices and maintained the required temp via the on/off cycle. It is quite to raise & lower base temps if, for example, you want a diacetyl rest period. Ultimately, this takes a lot of the headache out of temp control for homebrew and will only help quality and consistency of the product. It also help repeatability from batch to batch. Do make sure the fermenter is adequately insulated otherwise this device and a heatpad wont help much.

I bough this to help with brewing. I brew in a fridge set quite high, and likewise use one that's really cold. This inkbird both enables me to easily maintain my chosen temp, and to compensate for inaccurate fridge thermostats. What I mean by that is the analogue fridge 1-5 dial works fine at a set temp but only as long as the ambient temp stays the same. If it cools down, so does the fridge, if it warms up, the fridge does too. With the Inkbird that doesn't matter.. it stays at the right temp. This is even better for the brewing fridge, as though set to ~18 degress it quite happily chills down to 10. Far below what I need, again Inkbird to the rescue as it cuts off the fridge and kicks in the heating if that occurs. This means it's literally fire and forget. I can set it up and let it manage it, rather than me keep faffing. Which I needed to do several times a day previously.

Hello, thank you very much, everything is OK.

Bought as a matter of urgency when we took on a baby ‘rescue’ tortoise abandoned by its owners.Simple night and day temperature settings with convenient hook to hang behind vivarium. Tortoise now thankfully thriving . Great value and quick shipping .

It works perfectly

Works perfectly!

It does what it says, i.e. controls the temperature accurately, solid build quality, aftersale service is also good My device stopped working so i got issued a new one using the warranty through their website, 5/5 rating desrved

Works just fine Only issue are the square electrical pins. Requires adapter to suit Indian electrical plugs But seller has not tried to hide this.

All The 3 plugs are US make and hence very difficult to find adapters in india. But the temperature control is very accurate.