ways to cool conical fermenter

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monty73741

monty73741

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i was thinking of ways to cool my conical fermentor. i thinking after seeing soneone's keggle that had the copper tubing brazed inside the keggle i was going to do the same thing just run cold water thru. I have no room in my house for another freezer. so that would be the best for me...I cant do lagers but i dont like lagers anyhow
 
monty73741 said:
i was thinking of ways to cool my conical fermentor. i thinking after seeing soneone's keggle that had the copper tubing brazed inside the keggle i was going to do the same thing just run cold water thru. I have no room in my house for another freezer. so that would be the best for me...I cant do lagers but i dont like lagers anyhow
Click to expand...

Wet t-shirt or towel and a fan might be the simplest, but you would have to tend it fairly often to make sure it doesn't dry out.
 
i want to make something i dont have to tend to. I am a realtor so my schedule is not the same every night, plus i have the need to build something complicated
 
heres the way I see it.

I spent an awful alot of money on the conical itself, no way am I going half ass in keeping that thing cool. Keep an eye on craigslist for a used full size freezer that you can turn into an awesome temp controlled fermentation chamber.
 
Chimone said:
heres the way I see it.

I spent an awful alot of money on the conical itself, no way am I going half ass in keeping that thing cool. Keep an eye on craigslist for a used full size freezer that you can turn into an awesome temp controlled fermentation chamber.
Click to expand...

I have a 27 gallon conical (Blichmann) and made an insulated container 4 inches thick from foam board from my building supply and used an air conditioner to keep it cool. A Ranco controller keeps the temperature stable. The AC sits on the insulated base which is on the floor. I just lift off the box to get at the conical. I clean it in place. It works great for Ale or Lagers. It was so big that most refrigerators were just too small.

I know of another guy who has a stainless chiller coil that has bulkhead fittings on the conical lid and quick disconnects. He has a Ranco controlled freezer with a stainless tank with food grade glycol and a submersible pump with another Ranco controller that runs the pump. The sensor is in a thermowell in the conical lid so it senses the beer temperature. The pump only runs to circulate the glycol when the Ranco relay runs the pump. It works very well. He does have a box with insulation over the conical but it sits directly on the cement floor. I think he had to control the freezer temperature so the glycol would not freeze beer on the chiller while the pump ran. Like I said this thing works well but does require 2 Ranco controllers.
 
WBC said:
I have a 27 gallon conical (Blichmann) and made an insulated container 4 inches thick from foam board from my building supply and used an air conditioner to keep it cool. A Ranco controller keeps the temperature stable. The AC sits on the insulated base which is on the floor. I just lift off the box to get at the conical. I clean it in place. It works great for Ale or Lagers. It was so big that most refrigerators were just too small.

I know of another guy who has a stainless chiller coil that has bulkhead fittings on the conical lid and quick disconnects. He has a Ranco controlled freezer with a stainless tank with food grade glycol and a submersible pump with another Ranco controller that runs the pump. The sensor is in a thermowell in the conical lid so it senses the beer temperature. The pump only runs to circulate the glycol when the Ranco relay runs the pump. It works very well. He does have a box with insulation over the conical but it sits directly on the cement floor. I think he had to control the freezer temperature so the glycol would not freeze beer on the chiller while the pump ran. Like I said this thing works well but does require 2 Ranco controllers.
Click to expand...

All that.. Why not just put the fermenter in the fridge??
 
well I have no room in my TH for another freezer. Its a plastic conical So putting fitting in is easy. I do pics when i have time. LOL, I decided to re insulate my attic. so that this weekends project
 
Chimone said:
what a wonderful problem to have :)
Click to expand...

Yes it is, I have plenty of great beer and can save yeast for the next brew. I think the foam box is the easiest way to go and is not too expensive. The small AC unit is 50 to 100 dollars and the Ranco is about 50 dollars on ebay. The whole thing is way cheaper than a fridge and really cheap to run because of the thick walls. I could go thicker than 4 inches insulation too for very little money.
 
Have done internal coils for conical cooling, 50' coil of 1/2" annealed SS tubing wound in coil like immersion chiller and connected to refrigerated water cooler with a pump for cooling. Do not have pictures as this was about 10 years ago and was done to a 20 gallon conical. The carboy cooling band is a prototype to test cooling capacity and temp control, will be attached to the brewing system cooling system Picasa Web Albums - Kevin - Cooling system. One of the upright water coolers has a sufficient sized refrigeration system for conical and carboy cooling, is fairly easy to modify, and has a fairly small footprint. You need to rework water piping and add a mag drive pump, a ranco controller that cycles pump, and leave cooler temperature control on original thermostat set to minimum ( about 40 deg F.).
 
I am extremely interested in this concept for fermentation,Polypropylene glycol \ can be heated up or cooled , or both depending on your needs.

I am drawing up some plans for a heat pump idea, both heating and cooling functions, (using Kevin's idea )of a copper exchanger around a carboy, conical, or keg. Utilizing the thermowell concept to monitor temps, and a ranco style 2 stage thermometer to regulate/optimized temps.

The key to this all, is the housing the idea, aluminium fins ( like an automotive oil cooler w/fan ) would cool and a electric coil would heat, but how would be the best way to do both ? any ideas ? some sort of tank and coil ?
 
Keep the cooling liquid and use self limiting heating cable for heating, would be much cheaper and easier to build. One could use a copper coil or container in freezer compartment and use a 15% glycol solution to prevent coil freeze up, circulate with a mag coupled pump on demand. Have seen a 3 BBl micro system with a copper coil in icemaker hopper for cooling the conical, kinda ghetto but it worked. The refigerated water coolers have about 1600-2000 btu cooling capacity which is more than enough for 10 gallon batches (works on a 20 gallon conical), insulation would be a requirement. Heating cable could be attached with silicone adhesive but would probably need extra length to compensate for lower heat transfer of silicone adhesive. All one needs to do is calculate surface area of fermentor, R value of insulation, and temperature difference to get heating/cooling loads for fermenter. If I remember correctly the heat of respiration for fermenting beer was about 500 BTU's/barrel at high krausen, has been a couple decades since using refrigeration text book so that number might not be correct.
 

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