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jas0420

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Hi all,

A couple months back I asked the group here about some off flavors I was getting, and one suggestion I received was to make sure I controled my fermentation temps. I had been winging it, and decided that correcting that would be my next project.

Before I proceed, I am the first to admit that my solution isn't practical. :) A chest freezer w/ external thermostat would have been considerably cheaper (and I would have long since been done with it!) but I don't have a really good spot for one. I had always been a fan of the Son of a Fermenation Chiller and started out thinking that would be the route that I would go. Always thought they were kinda limited in space though. Since the garage gets well past 100 most of the summer, I wanted it to be an inside "pet". A big styrofoam box doesn't go with most of the decor, so I kept pondering on it. I thought a shell around a SOF Chiller might work. Then I thought "hey, I could even make it a little bigger". Then I thought "ooh, and I could have seperate chambers and maybe try lagering some day". I planned something out and it wound up being too big to get around the corner of the room I had taken over with the rest of my brew stuff (previous building experiences taught me the hard way to check that first before building).

My loving wife saw my dilema and said "why don't you build something that you could put in the entry way of the house?" How cool is that? :mug: So then I got to thinking about something that looked like an armoire. I settled on one that would fit into the corner (we really did need a bigger piece of furniture in the entry... maybe not a beer fermenter, but to each their own).

So, I've finished building it finally. Still have a lot to do inside it though. I wound up with 4 chambers. I had planned it to hold two 6.5 gal carboys in each, but it turns out that it will hold three in each.

For cooling, I struggled with figuring out how to get air in and out from the ice chamber to each of the fermenation chambers. My plans for ducting had it taking up some pretty serious real estate. I wound up deciding on something that I haven't seen before, so I'm still at this point not sure that it will even work. I'm dedicating one of the chambers for ice and a 5-gal bucket of ice water. In that, I'm placing three pumps. Each pump will deliver/return ice water to each of the other three chambers, independent of one another. Inside each chamber, I am going to use a radiator that the "overclockers" use in their water-cooled PC's. Each of those will have two 120mm PC fans on them to draw the warmer fermentation chamber air across the chilled radiator. This will transfer the heat out of the ferm chamber air to the chilled water and back down to the ice chamber. So now the only space I will lose inside is what it will take to get some 1/2" pipe/tubing routed through it.

My thinking is (hopefully this isn't too far from reality) that since the cabinet is indoors, and the ice chamber is huge, that I can load it up and let it run for a few days without having to mess with ice swaps. If I have to, I will have some room in the actual fermentation chambers to place some ice if I find that I've overloaded what the ice chamber can absorb. I looked into some of the larger peltier coolers (like what they put into the small single room air conditioners) thinking that might help limit my trips on ice, but they were insanely expensive, so I'll have to do it the 1800's way to keep fresh ice. I wound up using three stacked sheets of 3/4" styrofoam to make each chamber, so each one is 2.25" thick on all sides (except the front at the moment!) It sounded like folks were getting a day to 1.5 days on an ice change with the SOF Chillers. I don't really expect to actually load up the rest of the cabinet to it's nine 6.5 gal capacity, so I don't think that I'll be overloading it's cooling capacity, but heat transfer isn't exactly my bag, so we'll just have to see!

I bought a handful of Dallas "1-Wire" temperature sensors and a 1-Wire to Ethernet converter so that I can get my temp readings back to a computer. I've got a little more programming to do, but the computer will monitor the temps, compare them to what I've told each chamber to target, and then toggle on/off the corresponding pumps and fans (via a 1-Wire relay switch), and email me alerts for events that need attention (the ice chamber's water temp and/or air temp out of threshold being the main one).

So I've got to get it plumb'ed up, wired up, programmed up, and some styrofoam plugs made to go behind each of the doors, then I should be able to test it out and see if I made a fermentation chiller or another cubby-hole for junk. :)

HERE ARE SOME PICS:
http://www.photosbyjasonsmith.com/the_fermoire

89265968.0v4rQLEP.FermentationCabinet0254.jpg




-jason
 
Not to steal your thunder, but damn.

Somewhere in this photo 12 carboys could be fermenting!!!

89265965.TlJouhiv.FermentationCabinet0250.jpg


If every brewer had these skills, we wouldn't have any complaints from our SWMBOs.
 
Looks fantastic! Definitely not gonna get any complaints from the SWMBO on that one ;).

I've had some experience with pelts. If you can give some numbers (ie how long it takes the X kgs ice to melt with no fermenters, how long with X kgs ice and Y active fermenters, what the temp differential is, etc) it would be a pretty simple matter to find out what wattage pelt you'd need. They can be had pretty cheaply offa ebay, too. 'Course, pelts use a lot of power to run, enough with a higher power pelt that after a year or two of electricity getting an HVAC friend to throw a little chiller together for you would probably cost a bunch less. If you don't have an HVAC friend, make one with some of that tasty HB :D.
 
Thanks for the comments everyone!

Ed, once I get it to the point that I can actually test, I plan on capturing a LOT of data on how the temps behave (I'm a sucker for pretty graphs). I won't know what to do with it, but now I know where to come to help decipher numbers if there's a problem I need to solve. ;)
 
Sweet job! Man, if I had one of those, I could keep my brew in the house.

Very nice. Let us know how it keeps temps.
 
I actually have a tip on the carboy/tile/other hard surface combination. I did fill the carboys directly on the garage floor, then carry them to the "beer room" for fermentation, where I tried as gently as possible to place them on the floor. There have been a couple of times where gentle didn't exactly happen.

I went looking for some sort of padding. WalMart sells these rolled up dense foam sheets (probably 1/2" thick or so) in the outdoors/camping section that are intended for pads to go beneath sleeping bags. I picked up a couple for about $5.00 / ea. and I move them around with me when there's carboy transport/filling/racking going on now. Makes for a much smoother landing when you're trying to be delicate with such an awkward, heavy shape.

I may have to get me a little red wagon or something to transport full carboys now. The front door isn't very convenient to the garage where I brew, and my back is already about 50 years older than I am, it seems. :)
 
Man, it's things like this that piss me off...piss me off that I'm not very handy and have the mind to even think this up, let alone build it...

Cheers to you! Great job.
 
That is awesome. Not only are you a skilled woodworker, but you have the capability to do all of the electronics work as well. Really nice.
 
Kilted Brewer said:
Man, it's things like this that piss me off...piss me off that I'm not very handy and have the mind to even think this up, let alone build it...

Cheers to you! Great job.
Me to... I am about as creative as... (can't even think of a good analogy)

NICE LOOKING FERMENTER!!!
 
Great work! I am very interested in the cooling system you are about to implement. It would be really great if you would also document that process so we can witness the evolution of Son of Fermentation Chiller.
 
Great idea and I'm envious too! As a fellow woodworker I see you take pride in your projects. I'm also interested in your cooling system and want to know how you did it, and if you have a materials list for the system. Thanks for the pics and once again, great idea!
 
I'll take tons of pics as I progress with the cooling part of it. Pretty sure I have found a way to plot all of my temp sensors onto graphs too, so one way or another I'll get some performance data up here for the world to chew on.

I've got a full house from Thanksgiving visitors this weekend and am out of town the following weekend... I'll be looking for free time during the week to get some more progress made, but it'll be limited so bear with me!

Thank you all again for the comments!
 
I've managed to make a little progress... You can see what was in my head now. To make it this far, I back-burnered tidying things up with trim, so excuse the sloppy looking places please... I'll get back to them!

For securing everything, I didn't want to pierce the insulation if I didn't have to, so to start out, I'm trying some sticky-backed cable brackets and heavy duty velcro. It actually seems to have secured very well (even loaded with water), so I'm optimistic that it will do the job.

Here's one pic, but I've added several more supporting ones to my site: http://www.photosbyjasonsmith.com/the_fermoire

So what is in the image below is:

-------------

(1) Swiftech MCR-220 radiator like THIS (The angle of this picture is kinda misleading, but there's 4+ open inches behind the radiator for plenty of intake air)

(3) Dallas DS18B20 1-Wire temp sensors like THIS. One is mounted to the intake side of the radiator, one is mounted to the output side of the radiator, and one hangs free with the intention of securing it (behind insulation) to the side of a fermenting carboy to try and get a temp reading on the actual liquid

(2) Compuman B1202512M-3M 120mm 12v fans (but most any 120mm fan should work)

(10 ft) Watts 42143811 3/4" OD, 1/2" ID clear vinyl tubing from Home Depot

(5) Philips PA1730 Cable Organizers from the computer network section at Lowes

(1) Velcro brand "Industrial Strength" 4" x 2" sheet, cut lengthwise down the middle. Found at both Lowes and HD.

Several feet of CAT-5 cable. One run feeds power to the fans, the other is for the 1-Wire network.

The carboys pictured are both 6.5g
-------------

89459785.fAceFRxS.FermentationCabinet0317.jpg
 
Know what you mean about time... Between this and BrewFlex and life and work (and I had to work a buffet project in for the wife to keep the harmony) it doesn't seem like I've had an ounce of free time this year. I've only been able to brew about 5 times... Tragic!

It's all been fun, but it's no good if I don't make time to use it! I think this will tide me over for a while on projects. I need to spend some time trying to build better beer next. :)
 
Well, I've got things together enough to give it a little test run. I've spent the past 3 nights installing Cacti (www.cacti.net) for charting. Great application, but 1000 ways to do it wrong. :)

Anyway, it's a little late in the game for a proof of concept, but I scrambled to get it running and some other loose ends tied up at lunch. It's been running for about two and a half hours now and it at least cools, so I'm cautiously optimistic!

My test here was just a flip-the-switch-on one... I don't have the software control programmed up yet. What I did was fill a carboy with 5 gallons of water that turned out to be about 93 degrees and stick it into one of the chambers. In the ice chamber, I have a 5 gallon bucket that I put about 3 gallons of tap water into, and then placed three frozen 2-liter bottles of water into the bucket (no ice cubes this time around). I placed 7 additional frozen 2-liter bottles into the ice chamber as well (these are outside of the bucket, just cooling the air).

The "air" temp sensors are all towards the top of their resepctive chamber. The carboy one is wedged in between a piece of foam insulation and the outside of the carboy. I think I should have insulated that more because I don't think that 5 gallons of water is actually cooling as quickly as the chart shows. The water sensor is inside a little thermowell I made, and actually submerged in the water bucket.

So it is able to at least cool the other side. The output air on the fan/radiator has been staying right about 3 degrees higher than my "ice" water bucket, so that was a pretty good sign I thought. Right now, I just loose-fitted some foam in to plug the doors, so they are not as tightly sealed as they will be, but it still seems to be holding up relatively well.

I'll let it run over night and throw up another chart of how it behaved tomorrow. (there was a little hicup when I first started logging this batch of temps, so there's a little gap on part of the initial downward slopes where data is missing).

89659567.Ubgll2tp.Chart001.jpg
 
Here's a little more data if anyone's curious. I've still just had it running in an always-on state so it is chewing through the ice chamber's cooling capacity quicker than it "should" once I get the controlling software written (tomorrow I hope).

It had leveled out on Friday, and I had a couple more bottles of ice in the freezer so, for the heck of it, I swapped it out with two of the three that were in the chilled cooling water. So I could theoretically step it down like that for lagering, but I don't know how hard it would be to maintain yet.

Variables/items that I still haven't tested:
  • How a heat-generating fermentation will affect things
  • How much longer life I'll get out of the ice if I put it in "thermostat mode" rather than "always on"
  • How trying to control more than one chamber will affect things
  • How sealing the doors better and getting them up to 2.25" thick like the rest of the chambers will affect things
  • How the carboy temp looks if I do a better job of insulating that sensor from the surrounding air temp

89748793.vfHrUjw1.Chart002.jpg
 
Beautiful work! and beautiful house! (btw, you build any other furnature in your pics? if so you do good work!) That chamber you are using for a ice chamber. Would it be big enough to fit a dorm fridge in? Have you pondered that as a possibility or is it just small enough to not get one in? Then you wouldn't have to mess with toting ice back and forth. :D
 
I wrote my first pass of temperature controlling software this weekend and have been testing it out the past couple of days. Here's what the user interface looks like... Nothing very fancy at the moment, but it's serving it's purpose. I'll probably re-write the control portion of this as a service at some point and run it on the web server where Cacti lives.

89885004.CgBUxGeL.BrewControl.jpg


This chart below shows from when the test was started (Sunday evening) through current (Tuesday morning). This was using only three 2-liter ice bottles to try and maintain a steady 56F temp on the carboy. The carboy happened to be around 56F when I started this, so that is where that number came from. I've pretty much left it untouched (no ice swaps) with the exception of just before Tuesday 0:00, I bumped up the frequency that I was polling the temps from 3 minutes to 2 minutes to try and smooth out the spikes on the carboy temp. I've made a little better insulator for the carboy temp sensor, but I don't currently have it installed. I still need to make some thicker, tighter fitting plugs to fit behind the doors too.

Think I'm going to be able to brew this weekend and test it out!

89884854.8qS1hRVS.Chart004.jpg
 
Hi Grim, I've built some other things like this BUFFET for the wife, but I think everything in those pics is store bought. :)

Yeah, I debated long and hard with myself on whether to have active of passive cooling. I needed for it to be quiet, so about the closest I actually came to something that is actively cooled was pricing out some of the large Peltiers that they use in small air conditioners. I don't recall exactly, but they were upwards of $1000 (US), so ice alone became a lot more attractive. Using air to cool the other chambers was going to take up quite a bit of space the way that I wanted to duct it, so I kept pondering until the water-cooled idea popped into my head. The ice chamber might someday get a Peltier assist, but I'll have to be realllllllly tired of carting ice or find a really great deal on a Peltier. It is entirely possible that I have way over-estimated the size of the Pelt that I would need (seeing how I haven't done any math at all on it!)

I'm hoping to brew next weekend, so I'll have a better idea of how much ice swapping I'm going to have to do soon. I'm relatively pleased with testing so far though... I think I can load it up pretty heavily with ice and just leave it alone for a while. I think. :)
 
jas0420, that's some awesome work. Did you write that program, and would you consider sharing it?
 
I hope so Brewpastor. I'm changing a few things with my next batch... Going to try mixing up some "profiled" water w/ RO water + salts (have only used local tap so far and found bicarbonates to be off the charts) and also controlling my fermentation temps. My fingers are crossed hoping that it will make a noticable improvement.

DSean, the image labeled Brew Control is one that I threw together this weekend... It is still very rough around the edges, and only going to be of any use if you have a HA7Net 1-Wire to Ethernet converter (LINK) and Maxim/Dallas 1-Wire DS18B20 temperature sensors (LINK). That said, I'm happy to share it if you have that setup or plan on getting it.

If it is the graphs that you are more interested in, that's a completely different, stand-alone package, so it might be something that you could fit into your setup... It is a public domain application called Cacti (available free at www.cacti.net). I do still call the same temperature sensors from Cacti, through the HA7Net converter, but if you have the ability to poll some other type of sensor currently from your computer (and you have a lot, and I do mean a LOT, of patience to set it all up), Cacti is a very flexible monitoring application that can chart just about any set of numbers that your computer has access to.

Jason
 
jas0420 said:
Haha... I'm flattered, but not I'm worthy of being mentioned in the same paragraph as Yuri. :)

You are to wood what he is to metal... *shrug* seemed appropriate. BTW, kick @$$ Buffet. I'm jealous.
 
I finally got to brew again this weekend! So far, the cabinet has done very well. I'm attempting to hold this batch at 68F. I pre-chilled the cabinet with about six 2-liter ice bottles (4 in the water, 2 in open air). That got the cooling water down around 40F. Once I was ready to put the carboy holding 5 gal (pre-chilled to 68F) of sweet pre-beer goodness into the chamber, I swapped out the 4 ice bottles that were in the water with fresh ones. That drove the temp down to 35F and left plenty of ice in the water. So it has been about 50 hours now, and the cooling water temp has risen from 35F to a little shy of 38F. From my previous tests, this curve will start accelerating, but I think I still have a few days left on this first batch of ice. That's pretty cool in my book!

The jury is still out on how best to monitor the carboy temp. I did circle around and make a pretty snug (and pretty big... like a 4-inch cube) insulation block to shelter that sensor from the chamber air. I think I've greatly reduced the influence of the air temp. The spikes on the carboy temp are only 1 to 2 degrees, (but still ugly) and they are changing so suddenly that I don't think it is the actual liquid... I think the glass around the sensor is cooling, and that is "leaking" in. I really didn't want to make a liquid-proof sensor for the carboy because of the contamination risk. I may just have to live with this for now. I've cranked up the temp polling to every 45 seconds, which is about as quickly as I can cycle through them all. So the fans aren't staying on very long... Usually just one polling cycle. The temp difference started out about 35 degrees between my cooling water temp and my target temp, so the chamber air where the carboy lives is getting a pretty good blast of cold air, and the carboy temp continues to drop a degree or two over the course of several minutes after the fans are spun down. I've pondered taking the temp delta into account and not leaving the fans on for an entire polling cycle if it was very great, but a degree or so is within the range of this particular yeast and it is still way better than what I had previously been fermenting with (see the red line for that!)... So I may just leave well enough alone for now.

All in all though, it's pretty cool to actually see it working!!

-jas


90225952.HFRND46j.Chart005.jpg
 
The spikes sound more like sensitivity problems with the thermometer than actual changes to the temp, either of the carboy or air.
 
Thanks, and likewise! I was pondering porting my website to the outside world like you've done.... Got an out of town trip coming up, so it'd be nice to see what's going on. I'll have to train the cat to do my ice swaps though in case I see a problem. :)
 
Short of something drastic happening, this will probably be my last update on this project, but I wanted to give one last report.

I'm about to rack my first batch to a secondary and plan on brewing another 5g batch later today. I haven't bought the hardware to finish up my other two chambers yet, so the new batch is going to ride along with the first batch while it's in resting in its secondary. I'm going to go ahead and reload the ice chamber today, but at this point it is a pretty linear temp loss on my cooling water. If I extrapolate that line out, it looks like my first batch of ice was enough to have lasted me exactly one week! Granted, that's only with 5 gallons fermenting at 68F, but I'm very pleased regardless. I've still got plenty of room to throw in more ice, and even another 5g cooling water bucket if I want to split the load of the other two chambers. Since I'm going to be mixing an actively fermenting carboy with a secondary, I think I'm going to add one more temp sensor to measure air temp at the same spot where I'm measuring the carboy temp. Think I'll probably use that one as the trigger and try to maintain a few degrees below my target temp. Maybe wrap the secondary w/ insulation. This really isn't how I planned to use it... Each batch will be in its own chamber once I pony up for the rest of the hardware to finish them.

On the graph, I thought a couple of things were interesting. If you look at the carboy line from late Monday through a little past half of Tuesday, that corresponds to when fermentation was most active. The fan was on quite a bit, and krausen was high. Then the krausen fell, and according to the charts it just lulled for a few days. If it is always that blatant of a change in the charts, I can let those tell me when active fermentation is complete instead of peeking in on it and letting my cold air slip out (an IR web cam in the chamber has crossed my mind too I have to admit... It's just not quite nerdy enough yet. :) ) I was a little perplexed by why it seems to have started picking back up on Friday. Perhaps it caught a second breath, but I THINK what is happening is that the cooling water temp has raised so much that the blast of air going to the ferm chamber isn't as signifigant as before and not having as big of an impact on lowering the actual chamber temp, so it basically isn't cooling as much and will start coming on more frequently.

So in summary, the liquid cooling has worked nicely in my experience. Don't know that there's any "need" to, but I would think this could be adapted to regular SOF Chillers. It would also let someone seperate to some degree their cooling mechanism from the chamber where they are fermenting or storing kegs that they serve from. I've seen pictures of dorm fridges and full sized fridges where they've attached them with duct work to the box they are fermenting in/serving from. An alternative to that might be to throw a bucket of glycol in the freezer, and pump your cold glycol to/from a radiator setup like this through insulated lines.

Anyway, it has been a fun project. I hope that you've found it interesting too!
Jason

90346703.i4D5XiFc.Chart0006.jpg
 
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