Beer Forum

my chest freezer is to efficient it chills the wort to fast, I measure the temp in the middle of the wort so by the time it reads the correct temp and turns off the freezer the outer edge is too cold and the temp drops to much. I am thinking off adding a heat wrap and adjusting it to say 3 deg. below the set temp and let the 2 fight it out, how does that idea sound?

I would just get an external thermostat to control the temp.

I have one, but I have the temp bulb in a thermowell so I measure the temp in the middle of the carboy, by the time it gets to the set temp the outer layer is about 4 deg to cold.

Your freezer shouldn't be super chilling your wort like that. It's not good for the yeast as you know. Are you lagering or is it an ale? I believe the rule of thumb for dropping the temperature if you are warm pitching is about one degree an hour.
If I was you I would remove the bulb from the thermo well and put it in the freezer cavity until the ambient temperature and that of the beer equalized a bit and then place it back into the thermo well at that point. that should keep the temperatures close enough that your compressor will only be on in short bursts and won't be creating a blizzard in your freezer.
Just for your own information you may want to listen to a few of the shows where Jamil and others talk about the use of a thermo well and decide if it is worth the trouble. Jamil talks a bit about taping the bulb to the outside of the carboy and why that works just fine. I believe it is on the Rochefort show.

Cheers!

That and chill it down as close as possible with your wort chiller. Use a 2 stage chiller (ie, the water runs through another pre-chiller sitting in an ice bath before going into the main wort chiller) if you have to.

HTH-

Ditto BDawg. I meant to address that as well in my post.

I understand why you'd want to regulate the wort with a thermowell but you're witnessing the downside. You'd have better results taping the sensor to the outside of the carboy so that it will react to the temp drop faster. The next best thing would be to put the sensor in a very small body of water like a whitelabs vial. It will provide a small temp buffer but won't take forever to cut out.

J.Brew wrote:It's not good for the yeast as you know.

I took Igor's note to mean he was chilling the wort prior to pitching. That right Igor? I've had to do the same thing since down here in the Deep South, especially during the summer, my immersion chiller just can't get the tempurature down far enough ... even with a pre-chiller.

Bobby_M wrote:You'd have better results taping the sensor to the outside of the carboy so that it will react to the temp drop faster.

That's exactly what I do. I have a roll of blue painter's masking tape that is now part of my brew kit. I tape the probe to the outside of the carboy and then wrap some bubble wrap around that. I tape each end of the wrap to the carboy too. This let's the probe measure the tempurature of the wort while being insulated from cold air in the chest freezer.

David