FERMENTATION CHAMBER BUILD

[GBRbrew]

Full disclosure, I know very little about refrigerators.
so I bought a used fridge to turn into a ferm chamber but I still want to use the freezer to store hops and grain. My understanding is that fridges work by keeping the freezer at temp and just using a fan to get the fridge portion to temp by cycling the fan on and off and drawing cold air from the freezer. Can I wire this fan into a temp controller so the freezer would operate like normal because its plugged in the wall outlet and the fan for the fridge only comes on when the temp controller tells it to. Has anyone done this, is it possible? Or am I way off base on this. Any insight is much appreciated.

Cheers.

 

[day_trippr]

I suspect the challenge would be to regulate the freezer compartment on a rational basis, as right now its thermostat is in the food compartment and will be subject to out-of-scope temperatures that would inevitably cause the compressor to run constantly.

One way to make this work: bypass the original thermostat and use an external controller (eg: Inkbird itc308) with its sensor in the freezer, set to keep the freezer "frozen"; then control the evaporator fan with yet another controller (as the oem thermostat is unlikely to have a setting ranging up into the 60s°F) to draw cold air as needed.

How much cold air would simply "spill" from freezer to food compartment with the fan not running would be something to understand and quantify as if significant it could try to dominate the food compartment and require more run time of a chamber heater to compensate. That could cause ping-ponging between heat and cool modes resulting in inefficient operation (ie: an energy dump)...

Cheers!

 

[GBRbrew]

Thanks for the thoughts, didn't even consider the freezer temp controller being in the food compartment. I have two inkbird temp controllers so I might give this try. Maybe try to rig up some kind of vent that would open and close as the fan cycles on and off (like a dryer vent works on the outside of a house) to help keep cold air from leaking into the food compartment.

Cheers.