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I’ve got the new keg of 3C on now so I’m having one of those while mashing the bitter. The 3C is lovely and served at just the right temperature thanks to the brew-shed. It’s had to work hard today with a temperature around 28C most of the day.

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I’ve got the new keg of 3C on now so I’m having one of those while mashing the bitter. The 3C is lovely and served at just the right temperature thanks to the brew-shed. It’s had to work hard today with a temperature around 28C most of the day.

View attachment 48344
My latest 3c is just bottled...I've ordered more hops today for a recipe tweak...the hops will stay the same but be added different times and a tweak on the malt bill...perhaps I should only do one change?
 
I managed 2 brews in the past 3 days, I thought that’s not to bad.All cleaned up and pitched yeast by 2pm today then read Mr HB done 3 in a day…..acheers.
:coat:
 
Well I had a pretty chilled brew-day today and the stout is now in the fermentation cabinet. There’s something really relaxing and a little hypnotic about several bubble traps tapping away gently.

I did give myself another momentary scare when I opened the brew-shed door. I could see the temperature was 14C but the cooling wasn’t on and should be at that temperature. Then I noticed the fermentation cabinet was at 19.5C and a quick look at the lights on the control panel confirmed the fermentation cabinet was calling for cooling - the fermentation cabinet of course gets priority 🤦‍♂️

5 minutes later the fermentation cabinet was back down to 19 and the shed cooling came on.
 
This post is for the engineers and data-geeks among you and is about my temperature data logging. Look away now if data scares or bores you.

This trace covers about 2.5 days from start to finish. You probably can’t see very much detail in this picture but the overall impression is fairly clear. There are three main distinct features; there’s a fairly regular saw-tooth trace, a rapid shallow version of a saw-tooth on a hump, and a pretty obvious “what the hell happened there” moment.

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I’ve set the temperature on the control panel to 12C and set the differential to 2C to keep the brew-shed at cellar temperature, in the main you can see this is what happens. The trace starts at about 9:30pm on the 1st and covers the last two days where temperatures here were 28C and 27C.

The first part of the trace shows the temp rising until the cooling comes on at 1am. The cooling comes on again around 4:30, 6:00, 9:20, 10:40, and 11:20. Apart from one small anomaly in the middle this is what I might expect, the cooling comes on more frequently as the outside temperature rises.

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The next section of the trace is the more rapid saw-tooth superimposed on a hump.
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What I believe is going on here is that through the previous regular section the cooling system has been using the stored cold in the glycol bath but has been gradually warming the bath until the glycol bath has no more stored cold. From the red line in the image above to the end of the rapid saw-tooth, the cooling had been on constantly. The saw-tooth is the result of the compressor switching on an off in the glycol chiller. I think the hump in the pattern is a reflection of outside temperature, the hump peaks at around 5pm on both days which is when the outside temperature started to fall.

The “moment” is interesting and at this point I’m speculating quite a lot. It starts at around midnight on the 2nd and I had put three 21 litre beers into the fermentation cabinet. Those beers were at 23C and I believe what we see here is the result of coolant being prioritised to cooling the fermentation cabinet allowing the temperature of the brew-shed to rise. It took until 10am for those beers to cool to 19C before the brew-shed cooling came on again.
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The humpy saw-tooth then follows because there had been no rest for the glycol bath to store up a reservoir of chilled glycol.

The system was back under control in the early hours of this morning.
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I believe what this tells me is that I need more insulation or more cooling capacity and I need some more temperature loggers to better understand the relationship between fermentation cabinet, brew-shed, glycol chiller, and outside temperature.
 
I believe what this tells me is that I need more insulation or more cooling capacity and I need some more temperature loggers to better understand the relationship between fermentation cabinet, brew-shed, glycol chiller, and outside temperature.
Bravo - very nice.
Couldn't agree more - you can't manage anything without decent data about what's going on athumb..
 
Bravo - very nice.
Couldn't agree more - you can't manage anything without decent data about what's going on athumb..

Absolutely. When I was managing a large IT team I always used to coach them to not just fix a failure but to properly investigate the underlying cause. I bought them many tools to log everything that happened on all the technology, everything that was done by every user, and all points in between. It took the best part of two years for the culture to turn around and the team became very proud of their service by the end with virtually no major failures ever and over 95% of all regular issues fixed at first contact.

All down to having data to help explain what was actually happening rather that guessing or worse taking no interest and just getting things going again.
 
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