temperature control

[Msk]

I was thinking more of buying the iceprobe and putting it inside the bucket for a total cost of $100, $200 with a brand new Ranco. Is there any reason it shouldn't work?


Msk

[Thirsty Boy]

Dont know bout the US etc, but in Australia, thermoelectric coolers are the latest thing. like this one



They are cheap. You can pick em up in kmart for well under $50.00

The lids with the cooling unit come off. You could buy 1 or 2 of them and make yourself pretty compact cool box.

Probably more useful would be the ones with the cooling unit in the side walls. Like this



They could be filled with water, have an aquarium pump dropped inside and be used to circulate cold water around your fermentor.

They are quoting cooling down to 18-25 degrees C below ambient, so probably a bit less than that in reality, and certainly less once your bastardise it for brewing purposes. But 10 or 12 degrees C gets you brewing ales in the middle of summer and lagers the rest of the year.

They warm as well and could be the solution for both winter and summer temperature woes.

I reckon there are a few variations of this that might work.

Thirsty

[BrewNoob]

How big is the one that cools/heats? It looks small in the picture, would it hold say a 6.5gallon carboy and a blowoff hose and bucket? I'm now fighting with keeping temps wrm enough in the fridge in the garage and my spare room in the house gets too warm. So far I have a small heating pad in the fridge and a johnson controller which keeps it from getting too hot on warmer day being the heating pad doesn't run an on off cycle. I'm still not sure the pad will be enough to keep it warm in colder months to come but so far it seems to be holding up to outside temps of 38F.

Gerard

[Thirsty Boy]

How big is the one that cools/heats? It looks small in the picture, would it hold say a 6.5gallon carboy and a blowoff hose and bucket? . . . . . .

Hey Gerard,

Unfortunately you are right about them looking small. Both the ones I posted pictures of are only little units. The bottom one is 18litres (4.75 gallons) in total and its a bit on the expensive side at $50.00 buy it now on e-bay. The top one is even smaller. You can get big ones, but at anything from $165-300 you might as well buy a proper fridge. Looking at US auctions on Ebay, it seems like they are even more expensive in the US than they are here. But thats just e-bay, I dont know about Walmart, Lowes etc.

On the upside, they ALL both cool and heat.

I was thinking more along the lines of using them as a jury rigged version of the aquarium chiller that SunkenBier has set up. A little pond pump and a big plastic tub all wrapped up in a couple of blankets for insulation. youd still need a temp controller though.

If you are brewing ales and all you need to do is heat, then I would go with an aquarium immersion heater. Under $20.00 and with its own built in temp control between 18-30 C or so. I used one all winter and it worked a treat.

Good luck

Thirsty

[JMUBrew]

Hey thirsty, do you think one of the aquarium heaters would work for a similar application but to keep the vessel of water (and subsequently the beer in the carboy) from freezing if I were to attempt lagering on my back porch (Heavily insulated of course from light). Just want to do a lager badly, but no fridge access for that and it's getting towards winter (this would be done in the dead of winter) (Not like the Midwest winter...but 20s-30s)

[brewsters millionths]

have you guys seen what one of the aussie brewers uses for this. the fridge isn't the expensive part , it's the temp controller, but instead he uses a simple on/off timer controller like you'd use for the lights in the house when you're not home. he just sets it up to kick in for a couple of minutes at a time and with a bit of trial and error has got a pretty consistent temp in an old fridge. can't remember which site it was on, but it's his own site.

[mexican]

Hey thirsty, do you think one of the aquarium heaters would work for a similar application but to keep the vessel of water (and subsequently the beer in the carboy) from freezing if I were to attempt lagering on my back porch (Heavily insulated of course from light). Just want to do a lager badly, but no fridge access for that and it's getting towards winter (this would be done in the dead of winter) (Not like the Midwest winter...but 20s-30s)

If you have the carboy reasonable insulated the I don't see why an aquarium heater wouldn't work. I've been using them for ages. We've not gotten down to below freezing here but pretty close and they still held a steady 18C. I found that the main thing to remember when insulating the thing was to make sure that the fermenter is sitting on a well insulated pad of some sort. A piece of polystyrene foam about 1-2 inches thick is perfect. Temperatures were much more stable when I had something stopping the cold coming up through the base of the fermenter when I had it sitting on a very cold tiled floor. When it was directly on the cold floor I found that the yeast tended to drop out before fermentation was complete.

I reckon the best thing for you to do would be to get some of that foam insulated panelling board and make up a simple box to fit your carboy. Chuck an aquarium heater in the carboy and the whole thing in the insulated box and you should be fine. I suppose you could use the box when things start to get hot in summer as well to keep the temperature down.

have you guys seen what one of the aussie brewers uses for this. the fridge isn't the expensive part , it's the temp controller, but instead he uses a simple on/off timer controller like you'd use for the lights in the house when you're not home. he just sets it up to kick in for a couple of minutes at a time and with a bit of trial and error has got a pretty consistent temp in an old fridge. can't remember which site it was on, but it's his own site.

Graham Sanders has it on his site. http://oz.craftbrewer.org/Library/Gear/GSanders/fridge.shtml

mexican.

[Thirsty Boy]

have you guys seen what one of the aussie brewers uses for this. the fridge isn't the expensive part , it's the temp controller, but instead he uses a simple on/off timer controller like you'd use for the lights in the house when you're not home. he just sets it up to kick in for a couple of minutes at a time and with a bit of trial and error has got a pretty consistent temp in an old fridge. can't remember which site it was on, but it's his own site.

Thats Graham Sander's on his own temp control set-up. Details can be found here

http://oz.craftbrewer.org/Library/Gear/GSanders/fridge.shtml

Grahams says it works, and I haven't tried it that way, BUT... Graham lives in the tropics, his ambient temperature is pretty damn stable at "bloody hot" I dont know how well the timer method would work in an environment like mine here in Melbourne. 36C (97F) last week and only 16C (61F) on Saturday. Might not be so effective. Of course if you had a basement/cellar with a nice stable ambient temp. Then it should work just fine.

JMUbrew. The aquarium heater I use (and others I have seen) are for heating tropical fish tanks and only really have temp control in a range between 18 and 30 degrees C (65-86F) so while they are fine for ales, not much use for lagers. I'm sorry I couldn't even hazard a guess as to how one would deal with sub-freezing temps and whether a balance at lager temps might be achievable.

If you had an external temp controller with the proper range, you could just get one of the big (300W ish) aquarium heaters, set it on full blast; and let the external temp controller keep it at the correct temp. Just chuck it in the carboy, dont worry about the water bath thing.