Bathtub Fermenter

[EzMak24]

Looking for a little advise.

I'm looking to control my fermenting temp and I was thinking about using an extra bathtub and temp control thermostat. I was curious if anyone has done this and wondered how well it would work. Here is my idea......

Fill bath tub with water. Place carboy in tub. Have a separate cooler or container with ice water with a submersible pond pump in it connected to the thermostat. Run copper pipes from the pump into the tub and then back to drain in cooler. Circulating the cold water through the tub. The ice water should cool the tub to whatever temp I want and because it is water instead of air surrounding the carboy it should hold a more consistent temp inside the carboy.

Any advise is welcome and please leave feedback on this idea.

 

[Brooklyn-Brewtality]

You can do it a lot simpler.

I just put the carboys in some container of water, and cycle frozen bottles of water in and out every ~12 hours (depending on season and desired fermentation temp). Keep a wet t-shirt over the carboy with the neck of the carboy out the neck of the shirt. As the cold water on the shirt evaporates, it will wick more up from the tub.

Works great.

 

[EzMak24]

You can do it a lot simpler.

I just put the carboys in some container of water, and cycle frozen bottles of water in and out every ~12 hours (depending on season and desired fermentation temp). Keep a wet t-shirt over the carboy with the neck of the carboy out the neck of the shirt. As the cold water on the shirt evaporates, it will wick more up from the tub.

Works great.

I have done this in the past and it does work great but I'm looking for a more exact control of temp and a set it and forget it kinda thing. I'll only need to replenish the ice water once a day.

 

[Brooklyn-Brewtality]

Well, hey, if you are looking for a more exact (re: comlicated ) way of doing things, I won't stop you. Sometimes that is half the fun.


I am not sure, but it might be easier to have the copper chiller in the extra bucket filled with ice and the pump in the tub (just switch what you are planning). I think that way you would get better water circulation in the tub, and the copper chiller would get the most heat transfer from the ice/water.

 

[kingmatt]

Looking for a little advise.

I'm looking to control my fermenting temp and I was thinking about using an extra bathtub and temp control thermostat. I was curious if anyone has done this and wondered how well it would work. Here is my idea......

Fill bath tub with water. Place carboy in tub. Have a separate cooler or container with ice water with a submersible pond pump in it connected to the thermostat. Run copper pipes from the pump into the tub and then back to drain in cooler. Circulating the cold water through the tub. The ice water should cool the tub to whatever temp I want and because it is water instead of air surrounding the carboy it should hold a more consistent temp inside the carboy.

Any advise is welcome and please leave feedback on this idea.

Sounds like it would be a huge PIA to go through all that. My recommendation would be, if you already have a temp controller, just pick up a cheap mini-fridge or chest freezer off craigslist (you can easily find one for under $100) hook up your controller and bingo!

No need to worry about circulating water and ice.

 

[camiller]

In lieu of using a whole bathtub. just use a second cooler, storage tub etc. Someone on here did one where they basically built a overflow tube from the fermenting cooler to drain back to the "ice" cooler and just pumped the ice water to the fermenting cooler as needed.

Edit: found it! https://www.homebrewtalk.com/f51/water-fermentation-chiller-81501/

 

[wrench]

Just my $0.02... I would think you'd need an awful lot of ice and constant recirculation to keep a whole tub full of water 10+ degrees below ambient.