hey guys, i've posted a few times about starting a nano and i'm still working on that... but in the meantime i wanted to try temp controlling my 15 gallon plastic conical. i figured i would try it at this size and see how it worked before possibly attempting at a larger size.
i ended up using a 50 ft SS coil for a jockey box as an immersion chiller (much like the set up you can buy from brewhemoth for their conicals). i use a small pond pump inside of a 5 gallon cooler to pump cold water through the coil, while a ranco controller controls the pump. i drilled a hole in my airlock stopper and use a thermoprobe for the temp sensor inside the conical.
i'm just rotating in frozen water bottles to keep the water cold.
so far i've had pretty good results, holding 68 degrees in 75 degree ambient temps for 48 hrs without changing bottles. i have not maxed out the system yet to see what she can do. i may try salt water to see if i can get the temp even lower for less bottle swapping.
the "motion" of the fermenting beer does a great job of keeping the temps even through out fermentation, but once it finishes up the chiller does not work as well obviously... so crashing still needs to be done in a seperate vessel.
my vision for this at a nano scale is to have a "master" cold water supply ( a large volume of salt walter in a chester freezer holding 32 degrees) with multiple small pumps submerged in the freezer feeding multiple fermenters. not sure how effective this would be or how many 1bbl fermenters i could control, but i guess that will come with time.
either way its been a fun experiment... i know i'm not pro yet but what do you all think?
i ended up using a 50 ft SS coil for a jockey box as an immersion chiller (much like the set up you can buy from brewhemoth for their conicals). i use a small pond pump inside of a 5 gallon cooler to pump cold water through the coil, while a ranco controller controls the pump. i drilled a hole in my airlock stopper and use a thermoprobe for the temp sensor inside the conical.
i'm just rotating in frozen water bottles to keep the water cold.
so far i've had pretty good results, holding 68 degrees in 75 degree ambient temps for 48 hrs without changing bottles. i have not maxed out the system yet to see what she can do. i may try salt water to see if i can get the temp even lower for less bottle swapping.
the "motion" of the fermenting beer does a great job of keeping the temps even through out fermentation, but once it finishes up the chiller does not work as well obviously... so crashing still needs to be done in a seperate vessel.
my vision for this at a nano scale is to have a "master" cold water supply ( a large volume of salt walter in a chester freezer holding 32 degrees) with multiple small pumps submerged in the freezer feeding multiple fermenters. not sure how effective this would be or how many 1bbl fermenters i could control, but i guess that will come with time.
either way its been a fun experiment... i know i'm not pro yet but what do you all think?
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