What Have I Done?

[bartron]

Thanks for the links, I'll certainly give it a go.

For the meantime I just stuck the fermenter in the fridge, turned it on until it reached around 14C and turned it off. The fermenting wort cooled to 20C and has been there for three days. Thinking of buying a second fermenter to do...well...secondary fermentation as well as bulk priming. So far it looks like the wort will keep the temp up a little so I'll just hook up a 20W lightbulb to warm things over winter. That gives me a few months to think about cooling during summer.

Cheers :beer:

Bartron

 

[Tony M]

I've set up my 3 fridges with electronic temp control, providing individual heating & cooling for each fridge. The sensors are sitting in the brew via a second hole drilled in the fermenter lid which takes a s/s sealed tube for the sensor to sit in.

This setup enables me to control the ferment much more effectively as I'm controling the brew temp, not the ambient fridge temp & with a far higher tolerence on the variance (+/- 0.5c).
A fridge compressor dosen't like to be turned on/off too frequently, which is why they can typically vary by as much as 10c.

[post="49811"][/post]​

Ross, I think you are setting a trap for young players here. What you have works for you because you have good and accurate gear. However most of us who are using cheap electro mechanical controllers have to live with a lag of +/-2C and if they measure this from inside the fermenter, that will be the fluctuation of the wort temp. I agree that you must monitor the wort from inside the fermenter so you know whats really going on but if the fridge temp wanders up and down four degrees, I believe that because of the mass of twenty odd kilos of wort, the temp in it would be extremely stable.

 

[sosman]

Anyway, I went and got myself a thermostat from Jaycay (option 3 on the link that sosman posted :beer: )

[post="48932"][/post]​

Yeah let us know how it goes. I steered away from that one because of the current and also electronics in the presence of condensation.

I'll put in another plug for my first and favourite option - the Fuji Koki (subs your fav here), still going strong and haven't had to change the batteries yet.