Cooling a small room for fermentation..??..

[lexuschris]

While I have been admiring the posts & pictures of your cold boxes, cold rooms, etc., I'm realizing that I need to have a better control over my fermentation temps!

I've kinda ruled out the extra fridge idea... just don't have room for it. And I know the wife won't go for building an insulated room in the corner of our stuffed garage. But that did give me an idea. Currently, I store my fermenter in the bathroom of my home office. That bathroom with a little weather stripping around the door could be a cold room. So, I looked at a couple methods of dropping the temp in there a few degrees, and would love to hear your thoughts. (e.g. house temp=74 deg. less 5-10 deg. = 64-69 deg.)

1) Get a small window AC unit and put it this bathroom's window
2) Get a swamp cooler, and let it drop the temp in this bathroom and extra 5-10 degrees from house temp.
3) Put fermenter in a bucket with water, and wrap the vessel in a towel .. allowing the natural wicke & evaporation to drop the fermenter a few degrees.

I also looked for some sort of 'cooling blanket' so that you could just wrap the fermenter, and plug it into a tempature control module .. but have not found such a thing yet...

Ideas?
==LexusChris

[brahn]

Wow, no cold room in the garage but she'll let you turn her spare bathroom into a cold room!? Cool!

The cold room idea is nice because you can fit as many fermenters as you want and could even keep kegs cool in there. I don't have the space for a cold room or extra fridge, I keep my fermenters in a water bath in Igloo ice cube coolers. One nice thing about this method is that the water temperature very accurately reflects the temperature inside the fermenter as well. To keep things cool I have a bunch of 2 liter and smaller bottles that I fill with water and freeze, I just add the ice as needed to keep the temperature where I want it. I'm usually able to keep it within a 5 degree range, which isn't exactly ideal but it works pretty well. I can also heat the fermenters for something like a saison using aquarium heaters in the water baths.

[lexuschris]

Wow, no cold room in the garage but she'll let you turn her spare bathroom into a cold room!? Cool!

Yeah, I pulled a Charles Deetz when I moved into this house.... "..mabye this house could use a little remodeling... um.. but why don't you just leave this room alone, okay?" I put a stake on this office, and it came with a 3/4 bath... Cheers!


=LexusChris

[backyard brewer]

I'd go window A/C especially if you've got a window. I'd cover the rest of the window with foam and consider some blow-in insulation in the walls. With the window A/C you would have better overall control and the power to lager that you'll eventually want. Being that it's a bathroom is great because the drywall will be Green Board and moisture resistant. But definitely insulate the best you can so you don't get condensation inside the wall or on the opposite sides of the walls.

Come to think of it, scratch the blow-in since it's usually cellulose and would mold if there was condensation. I'd remove the drywall, insulate with urethane foam board (awesome stuff, doesn't liquify in a fire, very mold resistant and very high R value) and then re drywall with paperless board.

[BrewMasterBrad]

......and, if you're looking for small A/C units, Lyn (spkrtoy) has some in stock at great prices. Just send him an PM when you are ready to buy.

[kevinham]

Here is a Wiki article about it, and the original forum post from HBT.

http://www.homebrewtalk.com/wiki/index. ... -in_Cooler

http://www.homebrewtalk.com/f51/my-late ... ler-11440/

[JonGoku]

If you decide to lager in there you may want to think about investing in one of these.

Fresh Version
Healthy Version