LagerJacket ferm cooling system
- Thread starter Feldon
- Start date
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Beerisyummy
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That was a 50l fermenter......Feldon said:
I think the unit will be pushing it above 30c ambient for anything larger than 30L. Pure speculation, of course.
My 85w chip was chilling around 25L of water and about 25L of wort without too much trouble. That's including the 8w pump adding heat back into the mix.
(Incl. 22c ambient, 2c bottom threshold and a shirtload of insulation).
I'd imagine 90w with less volume ,and direct contact, will do better than my ghetto peltier chiller.
Anyway, there should be plenty of graphs online showing the cooling capacity of similar units made for aquarium use.
aaronwalls
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To answer Gav's question, there are two carboy style bungs on the HX rods that seal up the lid and the weight of the device itself keeps that contact solid throughout the brew. The question about kill rates is also very important. The reason most peltiers break is due to the expansion and contraction of the structural material holding the thermocouple arrays in place within the peltier module. In fact, we've had many peltiers break on us when we pushed them too hard, or had them surf the set temp without a substantial hysteresis band. Using a standard PID will break the chips within about 3 weeks, or so we've found. The solution is duty cycle phasing, so we control exactly how much the delta between the top side and bottom side of the chip is at any given point in the cycle, minimizing the structural strain. This is all handled by the firmware in our temperature controller. What we have is smooth expansion periods and smooth contraction periods vastly elongating the life of the chips.
