And doing this from the beginning would greatly delay the appearance of the flashing "EL," since the heater would take much longer to reach the requisite number of hours before that "feature" kicks in.
Although it obviously has other benefits (i.e., redundancy and safety), the cost of an Inkbird controller is quite out of proportion to these cheap heaters.
I must say that, whether it's a flashing "EL" or a yellow light, it's disconcerting that ACO and/or the ODM finds this "end of life" warning to be needed. It appears that there is a lack of confidence in the design. Combined with other complaints of these heaters starting to make noise or just plain failing, I'm not sure that these things were ready for prime time....