Sure did. Besides making room for the cooler to fit up close without having to bend the evaporator all that much. On your aquarium pump (for recirculation) when you say daisy chain do you mean you just put a splitter on the cooling side of the inkbid? Great article Matt! Since we dont have to go super cold to maintain fermentation temps, we can use the super high heat capacity of water and create a happy medium of a mix of glycol and water. Because the plywood box has a fairly tight fitting lid on it, I needed a way for the glycol lines to exit the housing and run to the fermenters. Dont do what I did at first and order parts that were different sizes and incompatible because of it. One inkbird has the temp probe going to the fermentor to determine when to turn on/off the pump and the second inkbird has the temp probe inside the cooler of glycol solution telling the A/C unit when to turn on and off. It really doesnt seem like its a powerful pump at all. Just starting on my build. This was just the article I was looking for, thank you!
If you give it a shot, definitely let me know how things work out! is it possible to use ice maker for glycol fermenter? The fridge smelled hot and the compressor kept tripping the thermal breaker. It really doesnt seem to have any trouble keeping up with the heat in the garage and seems to be working quite well. Might make it look decent. Hopefully insulation remedies this, but my personal rig has only be used to test water and is currently working on its first batch of beer. I found a 2 y.o. Set the differential to 3*F so the pump kicks on at 38*F. This is pushing the limits of the system as the pump kicks on every 110 minutes or so and runs for about 12 minutes to get back to 35F, the fridge doesn't get much down time. Also just curious what are the dimensions of your whole assembly? I am opting to stop at 10 for now and hold my other 2 gallons in reserve as the tank is quite full and the front bulkhead, despite being made of 1/4" lexan, is still deflecting slightly under the weight (calculated static force against that surface is about 40lbs). I dont think you would really hurt anything by leaving it on, but I would still try to peel as much off as possible. Thanks for the step by steps on this. I guess it would all depend on how possible it is to separate everything from the fridge so it could be incorporated into the system. What pump are you using inside the fridge? As you mentioned the look was off putting as was the foot print. No problem at all. As far as changing out the glycol, I havent replaced it yet, but it might be about time to think about doing so. And thinking. Thanks for the quick reply. I have more money in glycol than equipment,. Im sure you could make a water tank, put in a fridge and control pumps and temps with Johnson controller But that would take some doing and money Im glad you got some use out of my build write-up! It may not display this or other websites correctly. Id hate to give you bad advice so Ill definitely defer to the experts on the subject. I dont have any experience with the aquarium version at all, but surely it would work just as well as the regular versions and maybe even a bit better? I dont think it has affected performance in any way, but its been going for quite awhile now and a refresher would probably be a good thing. Maybe someone else would have a better answer for you? The fridge I'm using is small at only 2.65 cf so you wouldn't be able to fit much more in it. I have an SS Brewtech unitank that the glycol is chilling and it came with a pump to be used for the temperature control. Any thoughts on this? Both the AC unit and aquarium pump are plugged into it so they both turn on and off at the same time. That is to say that at this point it does indeed hold 10gal of 50/50 propylene glycol and it does not leak. Unfortunately, Im not quite sure the exact size of the pump for recirculating they glycol. Hey Grant!
3/8 Hose Barb Inset https://www.usplastic.com/catalog/item.aspx?itemid=118171&catid=743. I cant remember exactly where I got it from, but theyre pretty easy to find at a lot of different places. Hi, great job! Im not very familiar with electronics and what different things are designed to do, so I decided to go analog just to keep things a bit easier for my brain. The glycol will lower the freezing point of the solution and the water will keep the heat capacity sufficiently high so we can pull heat out of the fermenter. With my set up I would typically have 5.5 gal in the fermenter and I could see these Being at diffferent temps. I'm wondering what size reservoir you'd need to hold two 5 gallon fermenters in the mid 60's where the ambient temp is 70-75. Should I swap it to high fan? Im glad you were able to get some use out of the build thread and get a glycol unit of your own up and running. We will see. Mini-firdge Stainless Glycol Reservoir, What Connector to Use? Hi Ariel! For the red and black wires though, Im afraid I really dont have an answer for you. JavaScript is disabled. Finally got it running and it wont chill and cant figure out why. I was going to box it in but for now ill just leave it as is. 
Hey Marshall! I just built my own chiller using yours as a template. Hey Matt, does the entire cooling fin piece need to be submerged by the liquid solution? Oh yeah, and I need to modify the hinges to accept the extra 3/8" of material now under the door. It also helps hold things where theyre supposed to be just a bit better so that theres less risk of damaging the copper tubing. I also installed a small aquarium pump inside the reservoir that will turn on and off with the AC unit to keep the glycol solution moving. Ill probably make a few volume marks in the cooler. If not needed I'm fine not spending the time on a $12 part. Once I get the pump and tubing Ill decide on where drill the holes. If I concerned myself with temp gradients inside the fermenter, I think I would slowly drive myself crazy! There is a red and a black wire on the thermostat controller. This should give me a freezing point of about 4F. This way, we can get the best of both worlds. any chance to test this yet? Im sure it happens to small extent, but theres no way that I can really control it at all. Enter your email address to follow Ornate Brewing and receive notifications of new posts by email.
In case anyone is following- the first two hours of run time demonstrated a problem. I bypassed the control unit all together and hardwired it. I know that the duty cycle on this is prob much lower that when used as a standard window air conditioner, but does it add a lot of heat to your garage without outdoor venting? Not only has the ice water solution finally gone away, but temp control is truly a set and forget affair.
That way you have plenty of (negative) thermal mass to do big projects like a cold crash. That is valuable information that you shared tjthanks for your continued updates and look forward to your findings! Here's some dumb math. I dont have a router, so I used a hole saw bit on each side of the vents and then just used a jigsaw to connect the holes. I ran the probe through the top of the cooler with a wrap around the probe right into the glycol. Even though glycol isnt going to help me make better beer, it definitely makes things much more convenient and takes away 95% of the temp control baby sitting I had to do. Anyone have a decent looking diy setup or something that doesnt cost more than my unitank. The only modification I did to it was to remove the rolling handle because it only got in the way and doesnt have any functional benefit for the glycol chiller. I just daisy-chained it like you mentioned so that the AC unit and aquarium pump both turn on and off at the same time. Ive ran it a a couple times for a few minutes and gets ice cold. I had a similar idea but not use glycol and to pump it through a heater core with a fan behind it to cool my fem chamber that I added to the small fridge. It was a seriously fun project and the amount of use it has seen made it all worth it for sure! I use the refrigerators or my beer storage but then had an ah ha moment with unused freeezer. So I'm comfortable this will be viable for lagering 1 vessel.
I wonder if it would end up turning on your fridge's compressor way more than it's designed for by constantly bringing in some heat into the freezer compartment? However, she definitely started to stabilize (you'll see the inkbird sitting at 47F with a target of 29F; fermenter is at 49.5F near the bottom and at 50.3F near the lid).
The first one is on the glycol chiller so that I can control accurately what temperature the glycol solution is currently at. If you are chilling 5 gallons of wort and you have 5 gallons of 30F water in the freezer, and your target wort temp is 60F, then if your beginning wort temp is 90F, you should make it. I have nothing to prove this theory, it just seemed like it would work best that way at the time. Hinged top on cooler side. Not sure if that matters. The compressor got fairly warm in a short time sp that might be another benefit of less water/glycol. What did you use? Likes, dislikes, anything you would do differently? Very nice! Need to decide on how many gallons I want to put in it. When Im crashing down to serving temps its running probably 75% of the time but only over an hour to an hour and a half until it hits the target temp. Then just keep the other dial set to H cool and thats it right? Cheers! I was thinking about bending mini fridge freezer into a container and trying that but Im not sure it would be enough to cold crash. I havent noticed any rust issues at all. I definitely wouldnt overload things by adding too many fermenters, but I would imagine it could handle 3 or 4 fermenters without any issues just as long as you arent trying to crash cool them all to serving temperatures at the same time. What size cooler did you use, and do you remember where you purchased it? Im dealing with very high energy bills here. I guess it really just depends on what the mini fridge is rated for. As usual for me, nothing ever goes easy. My setup currently runs pretty infrequently and doesnt seem to have any issue at all keeping up with things. If I had a router, thats definitely the route I would take! Yeah the Stasis looks nice and is the cheapest of the glycol chillers but at $659 there is no way. I'm searching for a larger container to use as a reservoir to fill the full width of the shelf it sits on. Thoughts? I went with the regular temp probe, and so far it has been working out great. Cheers! No idea how to even begin figuring out the math on this, so I'd put as much liquid volume in the freezer as could reasonably fit (gotta maintain some circulation space). For a better experience, please enable JavaScript in your browser before proceeding. Hoping this will do the trick and enable varied temp ranges down to cold crashing. I had read a few comments on this approach on these forums but nothing that provided much detail on build or examples. Seems that digital AC units are becoming more and more the norm, so it makes it a lot easier to find a suitable unit. I am thinking that they can both be spliced. Im really not sure if a dorm fridge would work or not. I dont have a great grasp on that subject and Id hate to give you bad advice. Ive found used analog window units for $35 on Craigs List, and portable units from $100. Any updates? I used Metzon's notion and set up the fridge as a 10gal tank, with two circuits (planning on adding a second vessel, likely 7gal). Put some thick rubber under compressor and condenser section to help with vibration amd noise. After months of searching for more build logs, I finally decided to just jump in head first and see what came out the other end. I did find some reviews that te aquarium probe plastic was breaking down after a couple of years. As far as the housing goes, I opted for a plywood box with casters and handles to make it a bit easier to move things around. I'm searching for a larger container to use as a reservoir to fill the full width of the shelf it sits on. Build a 2x2 platform on some casters and maybe box it in with the condenser end open and some side vents to pull in air. If you had a larger unit i'm sure you could. There is a black foam on the bottom and edge that is a PITA to peel off. Its a good idea immersing the freezer unit, Im sure this will work great. Will it be an issue with the glycol if I leave it? Have a few questions about the glycol. I see inkbird has an aquarium probe and a temp probe do you suspect one is better than the other or will the stainless temp probe survive the glycol bath the same (or differently) then the aquarium coated probe. Do you still get to use the rest of the fridge for something else? And then when Im maintaining serving temperature, it runs about 40% of the time. As long as you keep the capacitor to spin up the compressor, you dont need the fan or temperature controls since youre using the ink bird to control the temperature. Encouraged by his findings I took my own approach. If at all possible, Ive found that its best to try to keep the full cooling fin submerged. Thanks Matt. My actual question is how are you making the two inkbirds work together? This seems to be the happy spot for my setup so that the AC unit isnt running constantly trying to cool the solution and it stays cold enough to chill my fermenters easily. All of this is in a garage that stays around 80 degrees during the summer. Figured it was good. The higher the concentration of glycol in the solution, the lower the freezing point and the lower you can chill the liquid. I'm transitioning from a fermentation chamber to a glycol cooling system using a converted mini fridge with a freezer compartment as a chill source.