awesome, sounds quite easy cheers. This will be my project for the weekend.
Next weekend I intend to set up a fridgemate thingy to my spare fridge to controll the temp for my fermenting.
Brisbane weather has been anything from 20C to 32C...which cant be too good for my beer, I have 2 fermenting right now which hopefully wont taste like arse!
thanks again for the help guys, my taste buds shall thank you!
Once you have temperature control you may find that the secondary step is no longer required for most ales.
The primary purpose (IMO) of racking to a secondary fermenter is to get the beer off the yeast cake as quickly as possible. This is mainly due to the fact that without temperature control, autolysis can occur quickly resulting in off flavours.
With temperature control you have much less chance of this happening. You can also control the fermentation a lot better.
Personally, for "most" ales I normally ferment at a low temp (16-18) for around 7-10 days. I normally then raise the temperature to 22 for another 4-5 days after that, then drop it down to as low as the fridge can go. If it is a reasonably flocculant yeast strain it should clear up quite well ready for racking to a bottling bucket. This sounds very similar to the technique that deaves uses.
The exception to this is where you may want to dry hop, lager, or have strains with low flocculation, where you want to cold condition them for a long period of time to clear them up. If this is the case it is probably worth racking them.
Until you have a fridge, i'd stick to using a secondary fermenter to clear up the beer. Once you've got temperature control, play around and see what suits you.
Remember, every time you rack you're potentially exposing the beer to bacteria. Personally, I prefer to keep the steps to a minimum.
Just my two bob