I'm currently at the brew house bottling and noticed that the ferm room space heater is down. the temp is down to 55. is this on purpose or did something happen to the temp regulator?
Mon, Feb 25, 2013 - 8:08pm
#1
Ferm room heater
If you plug it in in another outlet elsewhere in the brewhouse does it work?
It works outside of the ferm room and in the socket on the ferm room light. Looks like there's no power going to the power strips and to the temp regulator. I didn't leave it plugged into the light socket, though. Space heaters make me nervous and I want to be sure it's okay to plug it into a socket before leaving it unattended.
I'll be down there to dry hop today & will check it out
Evan.
What time will you be there? Give me a call/text and I can help you
check a few things. I think I know what the problem probably is.
I'm also going to try and be there later today if I can move some
things around in my schedule.
It will probably be around 3:00, i'll text you when there
Did this get fixed? I was at the brewhouse just now and it seemed that the ferm room was at about 72. A bit warm, but better than the 50s.
This is not the first time (not the second or third time even) something was awry with the heating in the ferm room.
I'm not handy but I'm willing to help out if we can do anything to prevent this from happening. We boast a temp-controlled ferm room and I feel it's one of our biggest selling points. This part of the brew house should be running perfectly. Let me know how I can help.
Yes. Periodically that controller freezes up. Rare but it does.=20
Sent from my iPhone
Yes, the controller is working again.=20
Sent from my iPhone
Controller is set to 72 so that the front is around 65 & back is around 68 which is typical
Hopefully things will be a bit more reliable with the enclosure of justice.
Additionally, if we can get a bit more air flow as David has suggested previously, we should also have slightly less temperature variation.
Thanks for getting things working again, everyone.
-Adam
Enclosure has power as of last night. A big thanks to Neal for helping
pull some wire.
I landed power to the lager chamber. The top two outlets are for the
lager chamber. We need a label maker. I've labeled the outlets on the
inside, but it needs something nicer for the outside.
We also need a longer thermo lead wire for the temp sensor. Its
currently just hanging in the box spooled up.
If you go into the box, please be careful - shutting of the breaker
(newly installed breakers 13 and 15) is probably a good idea. There
are a lot of wires and terminal blocks.
The controller for the hot box is all wired too...but I ran out of
time and did not land the power for this controller. This also needs a
longer temp sensor cable.
The Ferm room controller is 70 percent wired. I still need to run an
outlet from the new enclosure to the ferm room and then interface a
relay to handle the high amperage switching of the heater.
The grain mill was my priority last night. This is fully functional.
The mill works off a toggle switch. I labeled it with a sharpie on the
enclosure.
If you flip the switch down, it will illuminate and indicator light
and then power up the mill. Once done, just flip it back to the off
position.
If the switch doesn't work...double check to make sure breaker 13 is
on. We should leave the breakers on and this shouldn't be an issue.
I'm out of town for a while...but will land power for the other
controllers when I get back. Still need longer temp leads though...
Arrrgh
Thanks, Dave (and Neal)!
And, wow. Whatever happened there with Dave's second message is some kind of awesome.
-Adam
Even with the ferm room temp controller functioning, we still had massive temperature stratification. Fermentors near the controller were at or even above the set point of the controller, while fermentors near the door on the lower shelves were in the 50s. I believe that fan we have in there is just not sufficiently powerul to move enough air. Kyle and I put a box fan that was lying around in the ferm room last night and it appeared to significantly help with the temperature stratification. After 10-15 minutes, air temps in the ferm room were within 5 degrees of the controller set point, even near the door on the lower shelves.
Obviously this is not the most elegant solution, but the degree of temperature variation was getting ridiculous. If we can come up with a more elegant solution to sufficient air flow after we disassemble/clean the ferm room, I'm all for it. Until then, let's monitor things and try to keep the ferm room from getting too hot/cold, for the sake of everybody's beer.
-Adam
We once had to do something similar for a server room that I was working in. What we did was get a few centrifugal fans (they're smaller but they move much more air for hte size). We could use a couple of those to really get air moving.
Oh... my... god. Why haven't we done this? http://thechive.com/2013/09/17/guys-rig-up-buddies-plumbing-with-beer-wh...