Brewpi Fermentation Chamber Build

Hey all, just sharing the love for brewpi here. Nothing particularly magical about my setup other than its mine!

This fermentation chamber build is complete and all told it took me a couple of days worth of hours to do and that was mostly due to playing with brewpi spark itself and relearning some of the freezer components. Also, its been a long time since i was so electrically inclined.

This freezer was very short, about 21.5 inches and thus it would barely fit my current small mouthed carboys let alone something like a big mouth bubbler. I need the big mouth bubblers to modify and install the temperature probes that i bought from our friends here at brewpi. A friend suggested i create a collar like they make for keezers and that was perfect.

I’m confident i can put 3 or maybe 4 6.5 gallon carboys inside the freezer. The paint job is chalk board paint because its just fun that way. The heat source is a paint can with a 75 watt light bulb attached to the lid like you would a ceiling. Pretty standard as i looked into different builds and its working quite nicely.

Note the brand on the front of the wood. Its my families cattle brand from Montana here in the US from when my grand fathers used to cattle ranch. He was the fifth in our family line and i’m the seventh. Its no longer registered but i still carry it with me.

The brewpi is on the front and i’m running the cables under to the back for the solid state relays and to the raspberry pi webserver.

I’m very excited for this b/c 1) its technology and automation and 2) i think this will be the thing that helps get solid and consistent beer out of my setup. I want to say i appreciate how helpful Elco and Geo are in the irc.

Cheers

(can’t seem to upload the files directly so a drop box link)

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Nice build!

I used a similar approach on my fridge, also a bristle feed through and chalk board on the sides.

I think the black chalk board paint, even though it looks great, is killing the efficiency. The black matte outside will absorb a lot more heat than a shiny white surface.

thats a great thought, i never thought of that in the process.

Do you think given where i live (Colorado, arid desert), the fact that its indoors, and that we’re dealing with typically mild temp swings that this is a real concern?

I plan on brewing saturday but running this with carboys with water i didnt need to mess with anything to get half a degree within set range.