I don’t have a good spot in the house for winemaking, so I use the garage. But in <?
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This is the controller: http://www.luxproducts.com/thermostats/win100.htm
Oh yeh, the wine is the WE Selection International Austrailian Cabernet Sauvignon just after racking from primary to glass (start of secondary fermentation).
amespace prefix = st1 ns = "urnchemas-microsoft-comfficearttags" /><st1lace wt="on">Southern California</st1lace> it regularly goes above 100F in the summer and occassionally down to the 40s overnight in the winter. Either way not good for winemaking so I came up with this. The controller for the heater (the black thing taped to the back wall, actually sold as a carboy heater and used like a brew belt but works great this way too) goes inside the fridge. Another controller for the chiller is on top of the fridge (out of the picture) but you can see its sensor right behind the heater controller. Leaving it outside makes it easy to read the internal temp without opening the door and minimizes the number of wires that has to go inside. I set them 3 degrees apart so they both don’t run at once. If I want 70F, I set the chiller to 70 and the heater to 67. Because the fridge is well-insulated they only come on a few times a day, keeping the temp wherever where I want with no babysitting and very little electricity. During the hot summer months I use it from pitching the yeast through bulk aging (I usually wait 3 months before bottling). During winter I only use it through stabilizing/fining and move the carboy into the house for bulk aging so I can start another batch in the fridge. You can also see a sensor taped to the carboy – that goes to a digital thermometer that records min/max readings of the carboy temp itself (which stays within a degree or 2 from the fridge temp due to the thermal mass of the wine). The 2 controllers and heater cost about $70. Works great!<?amespace prefix = o ns = "urnchemas-microsoft-comfficeffice" />This is the controller: http://www.luxproducts.com/thermostats/win100.htm
Oh yeh, the wine is the WE Selection International Austrailian Cabernet Sauvignon just after racking from primary to glass (start of secondary fermentation).
