I'm looking at building a simple temp controlled fermentation cabinet. This is just for the next few months until I'm out of college, I don't want to buy freezers and lug them around with me when I get a real job.
Instead of just sticking an AC unit into the box and controlling it that way I think I might be able to save a lot of space in my tiny apartment by gutting a mini fridge and putting the cold heat exchanger in the cabinet while obviously keeping the rest of the components outside.
Does anyone have any experience with hacking mini fridges like this? I'm assuming its not feasible to remove the coolant from the system, re-plumb it and then repressurize so I might have to work with the shape and routing of the current system, which might not be a big issue anyways.
In the interest of saving some more dough I'm looking at using a microcontroller with temp probe as a simple PID controller. This could also give me some extra things like temp data logging, etc.
Any advice?
Instead of just sticking an AC unit into the box and controlling it that way I think I might be able to save a lot of space in my tiny apartment by gutting a mini fridge and putting the cold heat exchanger in the cabinet while obviously keeping the rest of the components outside.
Does anyone have any experience with hacking mini fridges like this? I'm assuming its not feasible to remove the coolant from the system, re-plumb it and then repressurize so I might have to work with the shape and routing of the current system, which might not be a big issue anyways.
In the interest of saving some more dough I'm looking at using a microcontroller with temp probe as a simple PID controller. This could also give me some extra things like temp data logging, etc.
Any advice?