Sad to hear, my og one still runs fine but it’s old at this point from like 2014 or so

The polyscience is definitely a workhorse but it’s wild overkill for 99% of users. I will again point to I have a chinese no name one I’ve had for like 8 years now that has held up fine and was $13 from AliExpress because I wanted a backup. I have used it quite a bit for whenever I host a large meal and need to cook 2-3 baths at once

And honestly for what the polyscience costs you don’t get the value, imo. I have read people who have had them fail on the Chefsteps forums, it does happen. I don’t hold this against polyscience of course, failure is inevitable, but frankly for $1200 you should get a significant warranty period. You don’t get that, it’s like 12 or 24 months. If and when it breaks you’re hosed and on the hook for (very expensive, given brevilles track record) repairs

What you’re buying with polyscience is very strong power and a high degree of precision. The first point is why restaurants use them; if you’re preparing 30+ portions at once you need a circulator that can heat a significant amount of water. And to this point a lot of commercial kitchens doing this now use external heaters on the bath like this so that the circulator doesn’t need to be as powerful. The other thing polyscience does (or at least did) is higher precision on the thermocouple but this is unnecessary for culinary applications. It was necessary for laboratory circulators that they were making before this was popularized but with culinary applications you really just need accuracy within .1 degree C, which is not all that precise