Ok, I am close to finishing this little project. I have a chilled glycol tank connected to a pump that I want my BrewPi to call on when the beer temp is too warm. I’m fermenting outdoors (in the shade) in Vietnam at the moment. It’s hot.
I have an SSR, Pi, OneWire sensors and the Spark unit.
I plan on placing the thermometer in a thermowell in the fermenter. And when the temperature exceeds the profile’s temp, it turns on the pump to send the glycol around the jacket.
What device settings to I need to do this?
The interface baffles me still. If you can give me the kid version of direction I would appreciate it.
OK so while the platform is making large improvements using it with Glycol isn’t optimal yet. You will not be able to use it with profiles as things just do not work well. I believe the correct way to run it would be using either Fridge constant or Beer constant (@Elco or @Denny_Deaton correct me here) and you will have to manually ramp up/down as needed.
@Denny_Deaton and I both run Glycol setups on our systems, he using the newer Pi and I using a couple of older Arduino models. I have a little more flexibility with my setup so I can run ramps, but it took a bit of trial and error to get there.
That’s hugely disappointing. Profiles are the number one reason I started this project and bought all this stuff.
Realistically - what’s it going to make these improvements possible? Multi-chamber support requires a new web services API. I would be happy to help there with some clear direction. And this issue… where can I help?
Any timing on this? New fermenter is due soon and it will have a glycol cooling too.
And would be nice to run thd fermentation whike next next batch is being mashed.
By implementing that, BrewPi can control the glycol with just a beer sensor and no fridge sensor. It is a quick temporary solution until we have independent and configurable control loops.
Window AC unit with coils submerged in Glycol holding tank
Cooler cut and converted to holding tank
ITC-1000 used to control Glycol temps
Three submersible pumps (2 recirculate Glycol in tank, 1 pumps Glycol to fermenter)
Old Arduino BrewPi running the cooling pump/recirc pumps
I live in central Texas so no need for heat, mother nature provides ample. I put the beer in the thermo and the fridge attached to the side of the conical and am able to run pretty well, but even this isn’t perfect.
I love this idea! I’m glad I’ve been slacking this week on my plans. Tomorrow I was going to give into letting brewpi control the glycol temp even though that meant only one fermenter!
I even managed to get two brewpis controlled by one raspberry pi using the auto install scripts and used symbolic links to share the ferment data so I can see what has been brewed on either brew pi on either webpage.
I’m getting excited! So thankful for all the work you guys have been doing!
but do you want to have BrewPi control the glycol temp or the pump for the glycol?
I think of this thing controller the pump for the glycol, and have the glycol temp as cold as possible…
Depending on how your chiller is going to chill the vessel you will find you have to adjust things a decent bit on the cold side. I have two 1/2bbl SSBrewtech conicals with the FTSs coils in them and we found that if I super chilled my glycol I would bounce all over the place (overshoot was really bad). I had to dial back the glycol temp greatly to get things in line because the coils chilled almost too well.
I run my glycol at 40F most of the time. thats more than sufficient for fermentation temps. Just kegged a beer today that spent last week at 50F waiting on me to get to it, and had no problems maintaining the temp. Of course 40F also because I just haven’t gotten around to actually adding glycol to the glycol mixture and I get freezing on the coils with plain water at around a 36F set point.
If you can give me the kid version of direction I would appreciate it.
