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constant temperature

I put my primary fermenter in an empty clothes closet and use a selection of 40-60-75-100 watt light bulbs in two lamps to get my 80F for the red. I found I typically need 60W during the day and 100W at nite to keep the swings to less than 5 deg F. Just have to play til u find the right combination of day-nite wattages.

I put the fermenter in an oversized ice chest with some frozen jugs of water outside the fermenter for my 60-65F fermenting whites.

If you're doing a garage fermentation.... try surrounding your fermenter with water-filled 33 gallon plastic garbage cans, and tent the whole shebang to insulate it from the garage temp swings. Amazing how well that moderates the swings.

Gene

BTW, the CO2 doesn't burn. And the alcohol vapors from your fermenting wine are to dilute to catch fire, lest you're making brandy. Do take precautions to not have fabrics or plastics too close to any concentrated heat source. Don't want to add those smoky overtones to your wine do ya?

Reply to
gene
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Hello,

I have a wood furnace and therefore, have a hard time keeping my carboys at a constant temperature. Right now the temperature ranges from 65 - 85 because I'm not home through the day. Anyway, I have a 120 v thermostat, an electric tent heater (120 v), and an old refridgerator. You can guess what I'm thinking. My question is: Is this a dangerous thing to do? I mean the yeast releases CO2 gas right? And the gas released is not flamable right? Any better ideas? I was thinking on an electric blanket too. However, they are over my budget right now.

Reply to
hijem

hmmm. I knew CO2 didn't burn (that's what's in fire extinguishers). However, I thought that there might be something like alcohol vapors. This concerns me. Do you think they would build up in an old refridgerator and catch fire with the hot element on the heater? I guess I could drill a hole in the refridgerator and rig a bubbler outside of it.

BTW you might want to try a thermostat with your light bulbs in your closet.

You must live in a worm climate to have to put your carboy in an icechest. I never had that problem here in northern canada.

Reply to
hijem

As I said above, the alcohol vapors from the wine are too dilute to burn. If you want to try an experiment for this, open a bottle of wine, let it breathe for a half hour, then try to light the vapors at the lip of the bottle with a match (use long handle match if you're concerned)).

The thermal mass of the wine and closet are sufficient that the closet temperature doesn't vary more than 3 degrees, even with my simple, manual twice-a-day 'controller'.

Yup- temperature in the closet can get to 80F on its own in August-September out here in Sunny N California. lol

Gene

Reply to
gene

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