BeerBorg

Was heading out to a friend's house to pick up some construction supplies so I can get the wife's house ready to sell in the next two weeks (long story on that later when I am 100% sure), and remembered I promised my friend's wife a bottle of my habanero Flaming Fruit hot sauce. As I made up a ton of this (it doesnt last long) I had it stored in my kegerator in the basement. Went down and noticed the display of my trusty STC was reading "Err." Hmmmm. Unplugged it and plugged it back in. Seemed to be working. Noticed the compressor delay light was blinking, and while I watched it started to slow down until it stopped. Then all hell broke lose on the display as it splattered nonsensical information for awhile and then went back into "Err" mode. Anyone else have this happen? My WD TV box hasnt been able to connect to anything either so the only thing I can attribute both to is when we had the nasty storm and went into brown out for a day, although I did unplug everything in the house and throw the breaker fairly quickly.

I do have a knock-off STC that reads in "F" and will only heat or cool, which is fine since it is for the kegerator and I have no use for heat. But, I think its amp rating is also on the low side. Who'd thunk the Chinese would rip each other off? So, am thinking of ordering a STC-1000+ from Blackboxbrew. I know some of the collective have picked one up so am curious as to what you think about it. I am also going to pick up one of their non-flashable units as well. They seem to have the best price around. I am guessing they get those while shopping around for flashable units so they are of no use, plus they may have to remove the case to see what version it is, so the warranty is void - not that you are going to get any support in China for a ten buck product.

I have a Black Box and love it. The programming ability of the unit is just great. Will is fantastic to deal with and makes a great product.
My first one quit working, just a email to Will and he had a replacement out the next day with a return label for the old one. He got back to me after he checked the failed one out to let me know it was the relay in the STC that had gone bad (China, go figure). Plan on getting one of his flashed units too.

I have all my electronics, including refrigerators (and hence the STC-1000), plugged into surge protectors for this very reason, but even that may not be good enough. My refrigerators have ones that make a noise (since you cannot see them), most outlets in the house have this surge that plugs into the wall outlet, while my electronics center has one like this. I did this after multiple issues about a year ago (I had a few, now I have a lot). I learned in the process that surge protectors wear out over time and have to be replaced. It helped that my son worked at Best Buy at the time and we got them for 5% over cost. Markup on some of this stuff is crazy.

I think my problem is that we had a brown out and not a surge. Both devices were on different surge protectors in the basement. I think the problem also is both units default back to the "on" position when they lose power whereas everything else in the house defaults to "off." Oh well, paid twelve bucks for the STC and it still has been well worth it.

Lucky the compressors on the freezers and refrigerators didn't burn out, or maybe they got damaged and it's not yet evident.

I've only had my STC-1000+ running for about a week, but I have absolutely no complaints. Nice that it reads in F, and like Inkleg said Will is great to deal with. I have zero regrets.

I just got an email from Will. I inquired if he started flashing the v1.06 version yet. He said "no" but if I put a request in when I ordered he would flash mine at that version. This has a couple of new features such as displaying "OFF" when the unit is powered down. The one feature I liked was it supports two temperature probes - the main probe on the body being controlled and another one either at ambient or something like a small bottle of water. This allows you to fine tune the heating/cooling so you dont constantly overshoot then drop back down. He even said he would throw in an extra probe. So I will be ordering that as well as the $10 nonflashable unit for the kegerator after I get my Borg fix. Seems like a good guy to deal with and wish him all the success.