Towel with a little water method

[dale1]

Hello, I'm fermenting a cider and made a swamp cooler a little different than normal.
I only filled the water up about 3 inches in a large tub. I then places the fermenter in there with a wet towel wrapped around it. I've been putting an ice bottle in there each day as well. I have a stick on thermometer on the side and it's been reading 64 for the past 2 days. It seems this method is working, but am I missing something? Seems like that small amount of water wouldn't do the trick and is only cooling the thermometer?

Thanks

 

[d3track]

It's the evaporation from the wet towel

 

[dale1]

Works well! Seems more effective than filling the entire tub with water to must level.

 

[GrogNerd]

i put mine in one of those plastic container bins with 2 gallon jugs of ice, swap one out every couple hours, keeps temp down

probably same amount volume of water as yours, plus the displacement of the jugs does bring it up to must level.

just the amount of mass inside the fermenter keeps the temps stable and, as far as my testing has gone, the fermometer was at most 1 or 2° off of a probe I had inside.

so, you're good.

 

[MrHopScotch]

Making water evaporate takes a lot of heat energy and most of that energy comes from your beer, making it colder. I use this method exclusively for chilling beer. The towel will keep pulling up water through capillary action and is a really effective surface for evaporation to occur on.

If I want to get even more powerful cooling, I'll point a fan at the wet towel and this works wonders keeping temperature down. I can reliably keep a beer 10-20 degrees below room temp with this method.

My latest improvement to the system was to hook the fan up to the cooling side of an stc1000 so when the beer gets too warm, the fan kicks on and gets the temperature right down without me having to check on it and constantly try to find the perfect combination of speed and distance.

To me this is about as low maintenance as it can get without a fridge taking up space as a ferm chamber. Happy brewing!

 

[pricelessbrewing]

Making water evaporate takes a lot of heat energy and most of that energy comes from your beer, making it colder. I use this method exclusively for chilling beer. The towel will keep pulling up water through capillary action and is a really effective surface for evaporation to occur on.

If I want to get even more powerful cooling, I'll point a fan at the wet towel and this works wonders keeping temperature down. I can reliably keep a beer 10-20 degrees below room temp with this method.

My latest improvement to the system was to hook the fan up to the cooling side of an stc1000 so when the beer gets too warm, the fan kicks on and gets the temperature right down without me having to check on it and constantly try to find the perfect combination of speed and distance.

To me this is about as low maintenance as it can get without a fridge taking up space as a ferm chamber. Happy brewing!

This is brilliant. For a bucket fermenter, what would be the best way to attach a piece of cloth? I'm thinking a couple pieces of string to hold it in place.

 

[PitRow]

This is brilliant. For a bucket fermenter, what would be the best way to attach a piece of cloth? I'm thinking a couple pieces of string to hold it in place.

I use an old t-shirt for my carboy, but I'm guessing the tapered sides of a bucket won't work as well. String, as you said, or maybe some of those huge rubber bands you can get at office depot or something along those lines.

 

[MrHopScotch]

This is brilliant. For a bucket fermenter, what would be the best way to attach a piece of cloth? I'm thinking a couple pieces of string to hold it in place.

It's a bit of a pain but I usually just use a couple pieces of paracord to tie a towel on if I'm using buckets.

 

[pricelessbrewing]

Yeah I that's the plan, probably one piece on top of one of the rims then another about midway down the bucket. I wonder if the cloth messes with the readings of the stc 1000 thermocouple, probably not since it's inside some plastic.

 

[MrHopScotch]

I don't think the probe is waterproof if that's what you're asking so either don't have the towel covering that part of the bucket (what I do) or make sure to keep the probe dry somehow.

 

[pricelessbrewing]

More that the wet cloth may provide a false reading, but yes I'll just insulate between the cloth and probe.

Bucket, probe, hand towel, plastic, wet towel.

 

[Gary_Oak]

Depends on the air temp

 

[Psylocide]

Depends on the air temp

 

[pricelessbrewing]

Read up a bit more on this, the limit is called the wet bulb temperature and is a function of relative humidity, ambient temp, and pressure. For me that means I can never exceed 20 degrees less than ambient temp, but that's never really something I need.

 

[1977Brewer]

Read up a bit more on this, the limit is called the wet bulb temperature and is a function of relative humidity, ambient temp, and pressure. For me that means I can never exceed 20 degrees less than ambient temp, but that's never really something I need.

We use a ton of industrial swamp coolers in my warehouse. 20 degrees is the specified maximum cooling. Combo with some frozen gallon ice bottles, you can get lower.

 

[flars]

My swamp cooler set up with a fan. I have since started using a digital thermometer, Thermopen Dot™ . Towel is held in place with paper binder clips. The set up will hold a 10°F drop in temperature, without ice blocks during active fermentations, at an ambient temperature of 68°F.
https://www.homebrewtalk.com/photo/swamp-cooler-61314.html

 

[Subdivisions]

I like to rely on a large volume of water to cool the fermenter. I don't get it quite up to the top level of wort but the mass of cool water in the tub does a tremendous job of sucking the heat from the fermenting wort. I've measured the temperature with a digital thermometer and it's usually within a couple degrees of the water surrounding the fermenter.

It takes a lot longer for the temperature of the tub water to change so the ferment temp doesn't swing quickly. This allows you to toss in a 2-liter frozen bottle maybe once or twice a day instead of every few hours. I'll admit though that my basement stays pretty cool even into the summer.