Homebrew Beer Blog

The Dwyer Instruments / Love Controls TS Switch (
TS-13010 Digital Temperature Switch) is a awesome little controller. It can be used to regulate the temperature of all sorts of things. What’s particularly great about it is it can be used to run both a heating and cooling device, and they’re cheap! Another spiffy ability is it is highly programmable through its menu, letting you do all sorts of interesting things. Primarily though, I just use them as simple temperature switches.

I use them in my lagering freezer to make a chest freezer stay at 34-degrees. I use them in my fermenting freezer to keep that freezer at whatever temp I want to ferment at. This is probably the single most important function of my whole brewery. To be able to lock in any temp for any style, regardless of the season, is a great luxury for consistently making great beer. I also use them to heat in my fermenter. I typically keep the fermenter freezer 6-8 degrees below my set point, then use a wrap heater to keep the fermenter exactly where I want it. This way, if the fermentation gets a little hot, it won’t swing the temp above where I want it. So, here I’m actually using two controllers at once – one for the freezer, and a second for the wrap heater. Also, I use those wrap heaters so that I can ferment an ale and lager at the same time by setting the freezer at my lager temp, and using the wrap heater to keep my ales warm. Similarly, I also use them at just basement temps. For 1/2 the year, my basement is in the low 60’s, which is perfect for fermenting ales with a little help. And finally, I use this controller to run my herms and outlined there.

So, they’re pretty versatile for the money.

I did a quick little drawing on my HERMS wiring, so I thought I would move things around a little to show a simple wiring to just use it to run a freezer or heat wrap.

The idea is to take a light duty outdoor extension cord and cut in in half, or however you would like the lengths to work out. Cut a foot or two of the cord and use that as some extra wire. Cut a foot length or whatever you need of white wire, and strip both ends. One end goes into terminal #11. Then cut a second shorter jumper of black wire and connect terminals #10 and #9 together. On the plug side, run the black wire to the load #10 terminal. This can be a little tricky to get two wires into #10, but this makes for some clean wiring. You may want to snip off extra wire to make sure no copper is poking out. Then take the other end of the cut white length, the white wire from the wall plug end, and the white end from the female device end and splice them together. Then splice the two ground wires back together. I use little copper crimp splices and wrap them up in electrical tape for a secure connection. Then take the back wire from the device end and put that in terminal #8.

Tape everything up well, and you should be good to go.

UPDATE: 03/06/08 - It looks like there is a new wiring layout for the Love TS controller. Here’s a post with the updated wiring.

And the disclaimer… I’m just a dude on the Interweb, so if you don’t know what you’re doing, find someone who does. I so far have managed to not kill or seriously injure myself with this information, but that doesn’t guarantee you will find similar mileage.