Necessity is the mother of invention (broken brew fridge hack).

[Graz]

Out in the garage doing something or other yesterday and happened to look up at my brew fridge controller, heat light on, 13°C, feck. Not sure how long it had been like that, put a MJ Chocolate Brown ale on at the weekend, looks like it got going but the kruasen had subsided due to the temperature drop. Quick fix as I was working was to bring it indoors, seemed to liven it up a bit. Tube heater was cold to touch so likely knackered

Investigated later on, fuse ok, tube heater is an open circuit on the multi-meter so obviously burnt out. What to do?

Twenty minutes later one light bulb holder fitted in place of the tube heater and a 70W halogen bulb put in. Quick test and it gets the fridge up to 20°C in no time. Beer put back and it's holding a steady temp this morning.

Just hoping the yeast gets going again and finishes off fermenting it.

 

[AJA]

Nice work.
I just use a 100w lightbulb in a pendant hardwired into a normal plug, chopped from a recycled appliance. Cost less than £2 in total (provided you can still find an incandescent bulb), but does heat up the fridge rather quickly, making hysteresis a problem.

Yeast will wake up again, might need to go slightly above range for an hour or two.

 

[hoppyscotty]

Quick thinking. I do worry about the reliability of my tube heaters...they were dirt cheap off eBay, but so far they seem to be holding up. I have two heaters in parallel so do have some redundancy if one fails assuming it doesn't trip anything in the process of failing.

However I do seem to be seeing failing Inkbird controllers. I have had two now where despite being in. heating mode the fridge is still on, so heating element and fridge on simultaneously. In that fight my fridge wins. Not sure why they seem to fail...maybe spiking as the fridge is kicked in overloads something inside the InkBird???

 

[Graz]

Quick thinking. I do worry about the reliability of my tube heaters...they were dirt cheap off eBay, but so far they seem to be holding up. I have two heaters in parallel so do have some redundancy if one fails assuming it doesn't trip anything in the process of failing.

However I do seem to be seeing failing Inkbird controllers. I have had two now where despite being in. heating mode the fridge is still on, so heating element and fridge on simultaneously. In that fight my fridge wins. Not sure why they seem to fail...maybe spiking as the fridge is kicked in overloads something inside the InkBird???

In fairness to the tube heaters I think I've had this one for quite a few years. I lost one with the same issue in my other brew fridge after less time, luckily that one went at the end of a fermentation cycle so wasn't critical. They are at the end of the day just a coil of wire so have potential to burn out at some point or another.

Never had any problem with controllers (touch wood), one of mine is an Inkbird, the other is an STC1000 as either the Inkbird didn't exist or I wasn't aware of it when I built that brew fridge.