ESSR-60DAC Solid State Relay, DC In AC Out, 60 amp

I purchased this unit to control two heaters in a porch area. I also purchased another unit in order to compare and choose the one which dissipated the least amount of power. The current used in my application is about 12 amps, so I tested both at close to this level, using a 20 amp variac. As you can see from the photos, this unit (FOTEK SSR-60DA) dropped about 1.1V at about 13 amps (13 watts resistive) which is about what you would expect from an SSR designed to approximate the behavior of an expensive name-brand unit such as Crydom. The other units (Mager MGR-1 D4860) were over 2V and one was almost 3V, and this is at only about 11.2 amps, which is completely unacceptable (over 30 watts unnecessarily lost to heat) and thus requiring a very large heat sink to operate at even low currents. The FOTEK seems a much better unit.

I use two of these with PID controllers to operate the heating elements in my all-electric home brewery. I'm on my 35th batch and these SSR's have operated flawlessly. Even though the heaters draw only 20A, I over-sized to the 60A capacity to provide some margin of durability.

Used it 3 times and it blew out on the 3rd use, on a 30amp device.