First Look: SS BrewTech Brewmaster Edition 7 Gallon Chronical

[Vesteroid]

If anyone wants to do this, you can indeed cut out the thermostat, and use 16-22 butt splice crimp connectors to put the wires back together. Those heating wires are very fragile but once I got th3 hang of it, they were not bad. I used heat shrink around the butt splices and it holds the cords together fine. I bought a 12 foot one from Home Depot and secured it with foil tape. Will see tonight if it will hold temps. Package said 72 watts compared to,the 48 I had before.

 

[Vesteroid]

sad to say this wont hold the temp either. IT got down to 6 outside last night and the temp in the fermenter droped from 68 to 64 and ran all night.

I suppose I am going to give up and buy the glycol chiller and put a 200 watt aquarium heater in there and call it a day.

I havent gotten my ftss from them yet but its supposed to ship end of year, so I guess I will have to wait to try a brew in the conical.

 

[Vesteroid]

I have been doing some reading on this and could not figure out why I didn't have enough watts to keep temps. I just decided to go grab my fermstat temp probe and measure temps at th3 dump valve and at the top. Wow, was I surprised. Temp all the way down in the dump valve 49. Temp all the way at the top 88. The heating strip is. Limited to the conical between the tops of the legs and the bottoms of the handles so on about a 6" vertical space....but it's above the thermowell so that's why I never saw the temp I needed.

How would you ever keep the entire volume realtime;y constant with this fermentor? Even if I use the coils it only goes from about the 5 gallon mark to the 11 gallon mark, so would the bottom 5 gallons always be 20-30 degrees colder than the top 5?

I can't be the only one who has seen this, what are others doing?

 

[Vesteroid]

Of course, after all my experiments, they email me tonight and say they have an updated temp control syste, that includes a heat pad for,th3 brewmaster conical and a hot/cold controller....

 

[Vesteroid]

Ok, final conclusion, I took the heat wire and wrapped it around the bottom 5 inches of the cone and used foil tape to hold it against the cone. I replaced the neoprene and it works fine holding temps, and they are more or less constant through the height. All this being said I still ordered the new hear/cool control for the brewmaster edition just so I would have a one control, both heat me cool solution.

Going to brew a Belgian blonde this weekend to try out the fermentor.

 

[nzhood79]

So I have a couple of the original brew buckets with the ftss system - I'm looking at upgrading to this 7 gallon chronical. Can I hook up my current ftss through this and do you put the temperature probe for the ftss where the small black digital thermostat is on the first post?

 

[bradleyhunt]

My understanding is that the 7 gallon, non-brewmaster edition, chronical uses the same FTSs as the brew bucket.