I’ve been running a spark and brewpi for a few years now with awesome results. Enter Covid-19 and we’re stocking up on food, need to turn my fermentation chamber into a temporary freezer!
I’ve got it set to Beer Constant mode at 0 F and it’s holding around 10-15 degrees F with the beer sensor just kinda hanging in the chamber. It’s fairly warm in the room so it cycles every 20 minutes or so. Food is staying frozen.
Any ideas for optimizing this temporary use of my chamber? I might stick the beer sensor between some frozen peas to get a better read, wondering if that would stabilize things a bit more?
I’d suggest to remove the brewpi temporarily since you now have food in the freezer and let the freezer take over. Crude, but effective…
Unless it’s not a freezer but something else of course…the one I built is a chest freezer so I could always revert back to that.
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Fridge constant mode may be the more reliable option here. You have multiple items in there, and the exact temperature of any single item isn’t that important.
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I’m in the same boat. Can someone walk me though how to set this up? Im still very wet behind the ears with the new brewblox setup and Im quite confused.
Hardware-wise, there’s the fridge hacking guide (if that’s still an issue).
Software-wise, run the fermentation fridge Quickstart wizard. Either choose fridge mode during setup, or apply the “constant fridge temperature” quick action afterwards.
In fridge mode, your beer sensor will be ignored, and the system wil keep the fridge air temperature at constant temperature.
This is the big picture overview of where to look. Is there anything more specific that could use an explanation?
Ive got the fermentation thing set already. I cant seem to wrap my head around how to make it work in fridge constant mode.
I’ve applied Constant Fridge temperature to 0 degrees, and Im stuck at this point. Ive tried running the Ferment temp profile but Idk what else to do Its not cooling the freezer at all even after 40 minutes
In the fermentation dashboard, there’s a builder widget with a layout of the fridge. At the bottom, it displays the PIDs. What do they show?
If they show yellow “Zzz”, you’ll want to run the “enable” quick action.
Otherwise, could you please post a screenshot, and run brewblox-ctl log?
And, just to be sure: is the actuator plugged in?
I think Ive got it via the wizard thing. I did Fermentation Fridge, named it FREEZER, cooler output to Spark pins bottom3 (where freezer SSR is plugged in), fridge sensor set to freezer fridge sensor, and the same for heater (but the proper settings), next set fridge setpoint to 0 degrees F, setpoint used for control set to fridge.
That is working as of right now. But I wish I didnt have to go through all that, and just selected the Fridge constant and been up and running. I’m not sure why that wasnt working, but Id like to know how to do that for the future…
I’d have to dig into logs and error messages (if any) to find out why it wouldn’t toggle by using the “Constant fridge temperature” quick action.
I just ran the wizard here, and that seems to toggle well between beer and fridge mode.
Did the quick action turn green after toggling it? It may be you ran the quickstart wizard multiple times, and tried to toggle an older (and no longer connected) configuration.
(We’ll add some UI improvements soon for this situation. Right now it’s a bit too easy to have semi-hidden leftover blocks.)
All i should have to do is hit Fridge Constant temperature and it should work? I clicked that and it didn’t turn green.
Did you click the bar, or the “play” button to right of it?