Search results

Here is the assembled and taped fermenter&keg enclosure: Two inches of polyisocyanurate, which adds up to an R (F * square feet / (BTU/hour)) of 13. Long term this stuff degrades a bit, by about 10%, it seems (compare LTTR = long term thermal resistance and metric R column in the earlier...

Wouldn't the compressor be pretty much the only thing that can break on a fridge/freezer? I'd pick one from a working fridge, or find out why exactly your donor fridge/freezer was dumped.

That's amazing! I never thought about that, but that is a good solution. I guess the only tricky part is the dimensioning of the capillary? How do you determine how much refrigerant to put in? Do you have to calculate the volume of your plumbing, or is it just filling to some pressure at a given...

I finally decided to build a small enclosure for the carboy and the two kegs. I bought two sheets of 1" polyisocyanurate foam with aluminum facing on both sides at Menards (thickest they had in stock), and was able to cut all the parts for a box with internal dimensions 36" long by 28" tall by...

That looks pretty compact! Where did you get the chiller from? The Peltiers are about a factor 10 less efficient than a mechanical refrigerator.

So the one time I have done this, I had my sparging/lautering copper manifold at the bottom of the kettle. The bag might still have touched the bottom of the kettle between the coils of the manifold. The only partial melting/hardening of the bag that occurred on my gas powered range was around...

I've seen bar tops finished with a thick clear coating. I know it can be done with epoxy, but that of course will give off horrible fumes. Is there a water based polyurethane that the OP could pour on in a relatively thick (1/8") layer, after taping a dam all around the top surface? I guess it...

MMP126 (and OP, and anybody else who cares), the original question wasn't specific about bottles. I think for a bottle you would try to leave as little head space as possible, and then the CO2 in the head space is negligible, or splitting hairs, as you pointed out. But for a half full keg it...

And R must be Rankine, not Reaumur, I guess? It makes sense that somebody had to invent a Fahrenheit-based absolute temperature scale. After all these years, these units still amaze me. And it still seems like a good way to land a spacecraft below the surface... which of course is unfair. It's...

Yeah, but build a few of those enclosures, and soon you'll be at the size of a small chest freezer. Actually, today I thought about getting one, but space wise I'm telling myself I'm a bit better off building a custom enclosure that just fits my three vessels. Plus, I get to build something! On...

I think this is a downside of buying cheap TECs from Amazon. You are right that thermal cycling is not good for them, but lately they have been running full out, not quite reaching the set point temperature, so it's not the cycling that kills them. I think they are just crap TECs, not quite...

Another two (or more) of the thermoelectric elements died, and the cooler is performing quite poorly. It is currently dealing with a Pils and a Weissbier, each in a 5 gallon keg with very moderate insulation. Today I bought two 4 by 8 sheets of one inch polyisocyanurate (or poly iso) insulation...

Thermal conductivity of ice is about 2 W/(m*K), which is better than water (0.6 W / m K), and definitely better than most plastics (0.2 W/ m K), but not great. Copper is close to 400 W/m K, aluminum depending on the alloy 100 to 200 W/m K. So you are definitely better off with direct metal to...

Maybe you can get some money back from Bayou for a partial return? It can't hurt to try. Tell them you had to buy a replacement part yourself because you couldn't wait.

Thank you both! Abhishek, that's quite the temperature! I guess I'll bleed down to 1 bar then. The keg is at 16C or 61F, with Saflager W-34/70 yeast (2nd generation; first time used in Feb.2020; specs are 12-15C for this yeast). One of the pressure adjustments pushed some foam/Krausen into the...

So, what is a good pressure for lager (pilsner) fermenting? By itself the keg will easily go to 1.5 bar (hooked up to an empty second keg; both 5 gallon). So far I have twice bled it down to 0.5 bar. 1 bar = 14.5 psi or such.

+1 on what grampa said. I think 5 gallons of 1.05 OG beer produces somewhere between 5 to 10W of heat for three days. Maybe 10W on the first day, and then 5W for the next two days. So you could try insulating the batch you want to run hotter a little bit, or put it in a more spherical container...

In the mean time I brewed 5 gallons of Weissbier and 5 gallons of Pils with this basket. For the Pils I got ambitious, and tried sparging with wort recirculation through the grain in the already raised basket. All went well, until the basket sprang a tiny leak near the bottom, of course on the...

The solid state (Peltier) cooler in that fridge probably uses something like 50W electrical power. I would guess maybe a third of that (15W or so) is available as cooling power at normal fridge temperatures, and at steady state (inside of fridge is cold, and stays at the same temperature) it is...

I like the straightforward calculations in US units at that link, but I think the OPs problem might be not so much the raw cooling power (in BTU/hr) of his freezer, but the heat transfer from the liquid used to cool the fermenter via the air inside the freezer to the freezer evaporator. I.e. the...