It is shown through two nontrivial examples that it is possible to control DAE systems with PID controllers. A two-phase reactor and a CSTR with a heating jacket are linearized about their operating points, and standard linear DAE control techniques are applied to arrive at transfer function matrices. PI controllers derived using Ziegler-Nichols and BLT methods are found to control these systems at least as well as geometric-theory based control techniques. Considering its simplicity, the proposed method should be added to the toolkit of control engineers.