i use aquarium heaters but never cared about the energy consumption. my experience is that since fermentation is exothermic they rarely kick in. especially with larger fermenters it’s usually more important to prevent it from getting too hot. so maybe running larger batches might be something for you.
Comment on Passively regulating fermentation temperature
Aarkon@feddit.de 7 months agoFor me personally, this is less an issue of electronics (which I‘m sort of fond with), but rather of actively spending energy for a prolonged period of time, be it electric or fossile. Not only are energy prices way above US levels where I live, it also feels wasteful from an ecological standpoint. Especially so since there ways around it seem to exist. For that, I‘m willing to work with seasons and weather conditions.
Good hint though that yeast typically is more tolerant towards cold than towards heat. I didn’t consider this, but leaving a good amount of headroom on the upper end of the spectrum sounds like a good idea. That said: It‘s been pretty rare that the climate in northern Germany made cooling an issue outside of food conservation. But that may change in the future.
drre@feddit.de 7 months ago
Aarkon@feddit.de 7 months ago
Energy consumption would be pretty much determined by the outside vs preferred temp-delta, so brewing heat loving Belgian beer in the dead of winter would make those heaters run all the time I suppose, even with serious insulation. Northern Germany‘s climate doesn’t make cooling an issue for anything else than food most of the year, but I’ll keep that in mind, thanks.
My batch size is limited by the size of my equipment, I can’t really go beyond 20, maybe 25 Liters.
PlasticExistence@lemmy.world 7 months ago
Belgian yeast likes to get a bit hot, by the way (and tastes best when fermented on the warmer side of the yeast’s preferred range). That might be a decent choice for a test batch once you get an insulated space setup.
I can respect working with no power. I did that for a while too. Everything I mention is pretty power efficient though.