Temperature range for automatic water fermentor chiller

[DickyBenfield]

Hello Fellow Brewers,

I really want to build a fermentor chiller to control temps. I live in Florida and its pretty warm here, though I do keep my apartment pretty cool (70 - 73). I've been thinking of building one of the water based chillers that pumps water from a cooler of ice water. My concern is I want to be able to keep the fermentor witin a few degrees. I'm worried that by the time the thermostat turns off the pump, the super chilled water will have dropped the temperature of the fermentor too low. Does anyone have any experience with this? If so, how can you control it? I thought about pumping the water from the fermentor chiller through a immersion chiller that is in the ice water cooler, rather than pumping the super chilled water to the fermentor chiller. I would think that this would help drop the temperature slower and thus give you better control? It would also make it easier to deal with the issue of moving the excess water back from the fermentor chiller back to the ice water cooler, since it wouldnt move water from one to the other, just circulate the same water over to chill and back in sort of a closed loop setup. Any thoughts on that? Would leaving my copper IC in ice water for long periods of time (a week) do any damage to it?

Thanks for any advice.

Regards,
Dicky

 

[DaleP]

I use a Brewhemoth with the chiller attachment. Running 28 degree glycol thru it, a temp probe on the inside (taking the temp of the wort), I have no problems maintaining the temp I want plus or minus one degree during active fermentation. In the developement of this product, extra temp probes were placed in different parts of the fermenter to verify a constant temperature.