DIY Fermentation Temperature Control

[nightwolf172001]

I have trolled this forum for a while but this is my first post. I am fairly new to brewing and have become addicted to the hobby. I live in NM and the heat is starting to roll around and so I'm trying to come up with a method of controlling the fermentation temperature but do not have room for a fermentation chamber. My solution is to attempt to make something similar to the Brewjacket but for glass carboys. The idea is to place a copper rod in the wort with a peltier pad and cpu chiller on top of that and then controlled by a stc-1000 (already built this controller). My second thought was creating a way to reverse the polarity of the pad (so the hot/cold sides reverse) so the copper rod could heat the wort up as well, should it get too cold. Didn't know if someone else had attempted something like this before, or had any insight on how to safely have a relay switch the polarity? I have included a rough sketch of what I am thinking. I can not draw worth anything so have to excuse my artistic skills.

 

[Weezy]

Interesting idea. I'll gladly give my input but I've purged my brain of thermogoddamics 20 years ago.

You dont want to use copper. It's too reactive to the beer, during and post fermentation.

I'm not so sure peltiers are reversible by changing polarity as you hope. But I may very well be wrong here.

One peltier likely isn't strong enough to fully chill as you hope. There's a lot of peltier projects on here. I'd recommend doing some more reading. Here's a decent discussions. https://www.homebrewtalk.com/f51/peltier-tec-carboy-cooler-439525/


The rod idea, I wouldn't expect to work out very well. The peltier end will get very hot while the wort end won't change much at all. You really need some fluid to move the heat for you, preferably pumped but you could get convection to probably work pretty good too, to get any kind of efficiency out of peltier.

Peltier projects aren't cheap. Guaranteed you can get a bar fridge cheaper. But if you don't have the space, you don't have the space. A top down, single vessel idea is cute. You could maybe use a proper stainless coil through the lid of a Northern Brewer Bubbler fermenter. They have big lids. Theyeven have ones with two holes in the lid.

Good luck!

 

[RutherfordBrave]

A setup like this would most likely be really inefficient, but the design is an interesting one. You'll need to look into H-bridge circuits that can drive quite a bit of amperage for the peltier to get both heating and cooling, but it's definitely possible.