Refrigerator with Top Freezer and an ITC-1000

[sremed60]

I built a fermentation chamber a while back and bought an Inkbird ITC-1000. It works great

I ordered a second Inkbird because I was planning to buy a chest freezer this weekend. Now I'm debating if I'd rather get a regular refrigerator with the freezer on top.

My plans for the additional fridge are to: (1) ferment lagers. I don't anticipate brewing very many, but would like to have the capability. The fermentation chamber I built works great for ales 60F and up for two or three weeks at a time. But since I live in AZ where the ambient temp is over 100F seven or eight months out of the year, I'm not brave enough to trust a homemade fermentation chamber to maintain 50F for more than a month without issues.

Mostly the fridge I'm buying will be used to bottle condition stuff at 60F-65F, or to store finished beer at 38F-40F. I don't really need a "freezer".

I was wondering about hooking up an Inkbird to a refrigerator/freezer? If I hook it up so the refrigerator temp is say 60F, what would the top freezer temp be? I'm not 100% sure how refrigerator/freezers work to get the two temps.

 

[molson1993]

I just debated the same thing about 2 weeks ago, living in the high desert in SoCal, I feel your pain with brewing, this is what went into my consideration (both would use the ITC-1000). The nice thing about the freezer is it sits on the ground giving you more surface area to set carboys and it seems to be much better insulated, on the flip side, you have to remove the carboy everytime to siphon unless you raise your freezer off the ground. The upside about the fridge is that you can set it up to not have to remove the carboy prior to siphoning, pretty minor in my opinion. The wonderful thing about the freezer is later on once you decide to upgrade your chamber size, you can make a really nice keezer with it, you can pick up a freezer off of offerup or craigslist for under $50, so it's not really an enormous investment, I don't regret getting the freezer over the fridge one bit.

Hope it was helpful!

 

[DurtyChemist]

The freezer temp won't be much colder than what you've set the temp to. I am using an upright freezer and fermenting at 63f and a temp strip thermometer is reading about 58 ambient air temperature. It's okay for beer but wouldn't be useful as a freezer.

My only thought for you would be to plug the fridge in and get it cold like you're using it for food then plug the inkbird in and see how warm the freezer gets after it's been allowed to cool and cycle with temp control. The other option would be to use a glass of water to set your ambient air temperatures instead of the beer temperatures.