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| Fermenter Cool Box |
Here is our latest equipment which we built from scratch! Yup, you guessed it! It's a temperature controlled enclosure to ensure our Mini Brew conical fermenter maintains 68°F for Ales and 50°F for Lagering (which we have not gotten into yet). Because we had to come up with a cheap solution to our temperature control issues, we decided to build us a backwards ass contraption in the garage for under $80 that seems to actually work! Just a simple 3/4" melamine sheet of particle board of which we turned into a custom sized cabinet to house our conical! How does it keep the beer cool? Very simple, being that I didn't want another refrigerator running, we decided to rob cold air from our Kegerator which houses the cold home brew! First we will talk temperature control. I went and picked up a cheap "line voltage thermostat" control (be sure and use the one for cooling, not heating) cost is about $14 (Graingers). Once you have it calibrated and marked at the desired temp. this thing works pretty good! It is accurate to about +/- 3 degrees! Next we needed to figure out how to move the cool air! We ended up using a low voltage (12V) computer cooling fan. It's very small about
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| Line Volt Thermo |
2.5" X 2.5"! It has plenty of capacity to circulate the cool are around the cold box. It's quiet, uses very little energy and is safe because of the low voltage. They do make these "pancake" fans in 120V configurations but I could not find the size I wanted so I went with this! Cost, only $5.99 and the 12V adapter was $8.00! Not too bad! So now we have the air circulating around the fermenter and the thermostat maintaining the desired temps we want for perfect Beer! The next thing is where does the cool air come from? This is where it gets kinda kooky but so far we have good results! As pictured you can see the fan mounted to the wall. Behind the fan is a 2" diameter hole where a 1.5" PVC pipe is glued into the wood wall (liquid nails worked for us). The pipe runs down the side of the cabinet for a short distance (about 12") before it turns 90 degrees towards our Kegerator! The hard part was I had to build up the guts to take a 1.75" hole saw to the Kegerator! After a couple home brews I broke out the drill and went to work! BTW, If you are not fermenting and want to use your Kegerator for a party or event, you can insert a plastic plug in each side of the open holes in the Kegerator and wheel it off to serve your Beer! Before installing the pipe, we added a couple of wraps of good 'ol duct tape
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| Air Transfer Pipe |
around the flex tube to get a nice tight seal in the Kegerator! So far no air leaks (or very little). Note that we added some foam insulation around the pipe as we noticed condensation building up after the first time firing her up! It's an easy fix and will help keep the flowing cool air at temperature. The other thing I noticed is that when the fan does kick on, it draws enough air to make the Kegerator compressor kick on a little more often than usual but nonetheless, we are not running two appliances and I think this setup will burn very little energy! Time will tell! So if you have a refrigerator near your home brewing equipment and want to cheaply maintain your fermenter's temp. during the process, you might want to consider our solution. BTW, you can put a carbouy in there as well! I will post our results here after we have used it for a while. We just finished building it last night and are testing it before our next batch. We'll be Brewing again soon now that we don't have to worry about the hot weather! We are excited! I'm sure there will be a few little tweaks we have to do but I will follow up with that and report our successes with this project! In the meantime, Relax, have a Home Brew! Cheers!
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