Thank you guys so much for letting me know what's going on. I read the responses while I was out of my apartment and was nervous that I'd come back to an exploded fermenter, thank God everything was fine when I got back!
Anyway, I looked up blow off tube but everything seems to have pictures of them attached to a 3 piece airlock setup but I have an S shaped airlock. The bottling hose that came with my kit isn't quite wide enough to fit over the top of the S shaped airlock so I'm wondering if there is another idea or if I should go to the hardware store to buy something a little bigger? Or, if I'm going to go to that trouble, is it better to build a blow off tube system from scratch that just fits right onto the small hole at the top of my ale pail?
Also, once I do install the blow off tube, I see pictures of the other end going into a jar/bucket with water in it. Will that water not siphon back into the fermenter? what is the idea of having the water, to keep things from getting into the tube and back into the fermenter?
Any help would be great! I really don't want to blow the lid on this because I have a tiny apartment and my fermenters are in a coat closet filled with clothes! Maybe I should move them out and put a towel under the fermenter in the mean time....
Thanks!
Robbie