I have one suggestion, not sure how hard it would be to do. I would be interested in a free rise setting. So the idea would be that, rather than setting a target temperature and heating / cooling to meet that, you set a max (or a min might be useful in some cases). Then no heating or cooling would be applied unless the temperature approached the set temperature.
So this would allow passive rising of temperature due to fermentation for Saisons and the like. BrewPi would only “step in” if it looked like you would exceed your set parameters.
It would be even better if this could be mixed into a standard profile, so only one step, for example, was a free rise, the rest controlled.
I agree with this…i think the math on it would need to consider a few variables of the probes to let it rise naturally and not influence the actual temperature. There is probably a fudge factor much like what they already have to reduce the swing in heat and cold.
Thank you for the suggestion. I’ll have to think about how to implement this. I think as an extra setting on the actuator to only enable it outside certain bounds would be the easiest way.
To achieve this manually, you could uninstall the heater and reinstall it when you want to stop free rising.
@pennengr So, if I go into maintenance panel, Device Configuration, then set the relay for the heater to Manual Actuator, this will stop the BrewPi from trying to use this to heat?
What I am trying to do is to just allow a Saison brew, for example, to start at a given temperature, but once it is going, to allow it to rise as high as it will due to the heat generated by fermentation. I will likely cap it at a given temperature - maybe 30C, so that if it looks to exceed that, the BrewPi will start cooling the chamber to bring it back in line.
And @Elco, if you mean to change setting here, then ideally that would not be the way. Ideallly my thought would be that, as part of the Beer Profile steps, you could have an additional (optional) field. So the default would be to maintain that temperature exactly. But if there was this additional column with FREE_MAX or FREE_MIN, for example, it would indicate to the BrewPi to not attempt to change the temperature unless it was to go outside of the set temperature.
Yes, that’s what I did for my current brew, although I was doing a free rise at the beginning of fermentation (I then switched it back to a heater once I hit fermentation temp).
@Elco - Perhaps the implementation should be broader than something specific to free rise. How about allowing the option of setting a fermentation step where you specify fridge temp along with a max allowable beer temp? This would be ideal for a free rise, and setting the fridge temp would be good for repeatability between brews.
Personally I have a fermentation fridge outdoors, so I can’t rely on the fridge temp staying stable. Just unplugging the heater doesn’t work for me.