Year one I continued to brew through the year (2013) there was a marked reduction in quality for summer brews, I found by Christmas the poor brews had improved, but not as good as those brewed in Autumn, Winter and Spring, so I gave up summer brewing. However this year I was short on stock so for the first time started using the refrigeration offered by my old fridge/freezer.
However it seems all cooling goes to freezer, on switch on it must cool freezer first, the freezer however is too low to syphon from so method has been start in freezer with a STC-1000 holding the temperature down, then after first 10 days move to fridge. Until yesterday that was working fine, transferring (2nd July) at 18.5ðC it was warming up but very slowly, by 19th July it was at 21.6ðC start of day and finished at 22.5ðC I had expected it to cool down over night again, however on 20th it was 23.3ðC and over night it has only cooled to 23.2ðC this morning opened fridge and garage door but too late. Got it down a bit before it started to warm up, but can't really leave door open in case the demijohn in freezer warms up and triggers the cooling if door is open then it would mess up things.
Since brew started on the 22nd June it is now really ready to bottle so not too bad, at this stage it is unlikely to matter if it warms up, however if I can't keep a near finished brew temperature down there is no hope with a fresh brew. It is all well and good talking about adding ice, but to get ice means house hold freezer has to work overtime to make it in the first place. It has enough work to do keeping house hold goods cold without using it to keep a fermentor cold as well. The fridge/freezer used for brewing is connected to an energy meter, one day keeping the freezer to 19.5~20ðC used 0.10 kWh that means about 1.5 hours running through the day to keep beer cold, asking the house hold freezer to run an extra 1.5 hours on top of it's normal run time is really going to put a strain on it. And that is with a orange brandy liquor in the freezer compartment which is only 1 gallon and nearing end of brewing stage.
On the 22nd June when I started the beer that is now in fridge it used 0.20 kWh to keep it cool that's a lot of power to ask the house hold freezer to do on top of normal duty. I learnt in first year, the options are simple, get a brewing fridge, or don't brew in the summer. Whole idea of the energy meter was to see how feasible it would be to cool say a 2 litre milk bottle then place it in with the fermentor should the fridge/freezer I am using fail. The results have shown it is not really an option.
After first 10 days putting a body warmer on fermentor during the day and taking it off at night could keep it reasonably cool, but fermenting releases too much heat in early stages, it's not just keeping it cool, you need to remove heat, so room needs to be around 18ðC to keep fermentor at 20ðC, OK this is average temperature, but my office where I am writing this is at 25.1ðC at 7:23 am so even with overnight cooling hard to get it cool enough.
