Might want to invest in some new bucket lids
It's not just in buckets, it's also in carboys, some with with bungs, some with caps, some with s-types some with 3 piece, so much so, and with so many variances that it goes to show, as I've repeated daily that an airlock is an unreliable way to "measure" fermentation.....
Airlocks bubble or they don't for so many reasons-change in ambient temp, getting nudged by the cat or the vacuum cleaner, changes in barometric pressure, a semi going down your street too fast, like
this guy, lifting his fermenter up onto a table to bottle......Not to mention if you open and close the fermenter to dry hop or take a grav reading.
It's just as apt to react to changes in the enviroment the fermenter is in, as what's happening inside the fermenter.
We've hashed this out so many times it's not even funny. It's one of those things, it's one thing to have instructions in a book written 30 years ago to talk about counting bubbles, forgetting that many airlocks back then were glass and sat heavy on a grommet, AND there was no instead feedback like we have on here where over 40,000 brewers share their situations, and can say "yeah, but my beer....."
When you have people coming on here every day, with issues like this, you start to see patterns.
A beer may ferment perfectly fine without a single blip in the airlock. Or airlocks can start or stop or start and stop again, for a ton of other reasons, like temp changes, getting nudged by the cat or the vacuum cleaner, changes in barometric pressure, but your beer could still be fermenting fine.
airlocks tell you the WHAT is happening, that co2 is or isn't getting out of the fermenter....
but they aren't telling you the WHY. If it's fermenting or not, or off gassing or not. If it's done or not....
I've said it over and over and trolls like to try to get me, or even accuse me of lying (which I don't get why I would lie about something like this) but over the years of LOTS of batches of ALL SIZES and BOTH carboys and buckets, better bottles or glass, carboy caps or bungs, new buckets old buckets, s-types and 3 piece, I get about 50% airlock failure rate (but 100% success rate of fermentation) and it's any number if things, usually simply a non tight seal in the bucket or carboy or grommet....but to me the reason doesn't matter....the point is just trying to glance at an airlock and know what the beer is doing, just is NOT accurate.
My belief is that 1 occurrance is an anamoly, 2 may be a coincidence, BUT 3 or more occurance is an epidemic...and that's the case for folks relying on airlocks all the time, to me if 1 brewer comes on saying his airlock is not bubbling, AND he takes a reading and finds fermentation is going fine, that's an anamoly...
But DAILY on here there are at least 10 threads stating the exact thing...so MAYBE there is something to this idea that airlocks can be faulty. AND if they have the potential to be faulty, then how can we trust them to tell us what's going on?
You can quibble about it all you want, or deal in semantics, but we deal in sheer volume of users on here, and daily we have airlocks not bubbling, or bubbling from out of the blue, and many of them where a gravity reading indicates that fermentation is happening beautifully, or in the case of bubbling, has already ceased.
And yes, in an IDEAL situation (like let's say fermenting in a keg with a tight seal and no leak from around the airlock) the airlock SHOULD bubble 100% of the time (providing there's not too much headspace.) If more co2 is created than can be contained in the spavce of the fermenter, THEN an airlock should bubble....because an airlock is a valve.
But MOST of us don't have IDEAL situations, and rarely is a plastic or glass fermenter airtight- it really isn't supposed to be anyway...SO we aren't in the best situation to have IDEAL 100% accuracy of an airlock...
So that's why it's a good idea NOT to relie on or stress out about what it is or isn't doing. Just realize that airlocks bubble or they don't, they start, they stop, they bubble fast, they bubble slow, and they bubble or don't whether fermentation happens or not.
Like I said, the only accurate thing that will tell you what your beer is or isn't doing,
is taking gravity readings. Everything else gives you the potential for a "false positive" reading.
