I plan to brew a lager this Sunday 3/29 and it will be the first run of this controller .. thanks to all.
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I’ve got a Johnson, a Ranco, and 3 In birds. I prefer the Inkbirds.
I, too, have been using an Inkbird for years now, no issues whatsoever. I have two, a regular 308 (was in my old keezer) and the wifi 308 (fermentation fridge).
Never thought I’d need wifi, but now I would never want to do without it. Being able to check and change fermentation temps from anywhere is far more useful that I would’ve ever imagined.
I get an alert from Brewfather, and I can immediately flip open the Inkbird app and make the appropriate change. No need to remember to do it later when I get home, no need to tramp out the workshop (a detached building, where my ferm fridge is) when the weather is bad.
Ten seconds, from anywhere I happen to be, job’s done.
Highly recommended.
Okay, I set this thing up yesterday .. set the measurement to F° and the temp to 50°. The UI is a little wonky but I got it. I plugged the fridge into the COOLING outlet but as I was programming it, the HEATING light was lit. Once I got the settings right, the COOLING light lit up. But .. what is the difference between the HEATING and COOLING outlet? Or .. can you just hook up and control two things at the same time and the labels are just for user convenience?
As an aside, I fermented a few lagers with my old (losing its juju) Johnson controller and I assume they fermented in the 60° range. This is Omega 113 which I believe has a range of 50-55°. Curious if these lagers will be okay or if they’ll be estery. 
On the positive side .. this room is cool and the outside temps around that time were COLD. Maybe I get lucky.
The heating outlet is so you can plug in a heating element in case you want to maintain a minimum temperature as well as a maximum.
When I was fermenting in a shed (at a previous house), I used it with a reptile heater to keep batches warm during the winter.
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Do NOT mix up the plugs. For example, if your heater is plugged into the “cool" socket, it’ll never shut off because the temperature will never drop down to the set temperature.
But it’s nice because I can use one controller for my fermenter to control both heating and cooling.
I don’t imagine ever needing it to heat anything. I have the plug from the fridge in the COOLING outlet and I have checked it a couple times today .. always a tick or two within 50°. Thanks guys,
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This sent me down a funny rabbit hole (appropriate for Easter)! I bought the wifi version six years ago and it has worked like a champ. It’s infinitely easier than the Johnson controller (which I need to rehome), I have cross-checked the temps and they are rock solid, and I do use both the heating and cooling function, as the fridge it controls is in a detached garage. But the wifi function didn’t work well for me initially because I increase the fonts on my phone and the app was not sensitive to that. Because of this thread, I downloaded the updated app (which appears much improved), reregistered, and tried to connect things again, but the garage is just far enough from the router to make that difficult. What I want to do is unplug the controller and bring it into the house, but the outlet it is plugged into is way down behind my fermentation fridge. It’s not a huge fridge (a large dorm fridge, just big enough to hold my 5-gallon bucket fermenters) but with the challenge of the hard-to-reach outlet, this project became just cumbersome enough to put off for some other day when a friend or relative is nearby. I did not think answering this question would involve so much. 
But I am now also motivated to rehome my Johnson controller, which I kept “just in case” but will replace with another Inkbird if this one ever dies.
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An alternative would be to boost the WiFi. I had the same problem with my shed, too far from the router. I connected one of these network-over-your-power line. You connect the sender one in the house, preferably on the same group as your shed and the receiver l in the shed and voilà, wiFi in the shed. Don’t confuse it with PoE (Power over Ethernet), that something else.
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This is a great idea! My thrifty workaround for the poor signal is to first, open the garage door (this worked for my Google speaker) and second, bring the device in the house and connect it there (my plan for the Inkbird). But admittedly having a better signal in the garage would be nice.
Your shed needs to get its power from the group in your house for this to work, by the way. If they both get their power directly from the mains, there is no connection between them. And if they are in seperate groups it might not work. If I wasn’t based in the Netherlands I would send you my gear. I’ve moved recently and the garage is nearly next too my router. But good luck!
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