I’m just wondering what others use or have used for fermentaton heat. I keep my fermentation freezer and keg fridge out in the garage so for a lot of the year I am adding heat to fermentation. I use a 6 gal glass carboy and have a Johnson A419 digital controller. There’s the heating pad type, the belts, the wraps…anyone have experience with these?
I’ve only used the fermwrap but like it quite well. I use masking tape to tape it directly to the carboy.
Sunbeam heat pad without the safety auto-off feature. Taped to the inside wall of chest.
Same here.
Same thing I do.
+1
I use a can heater. I installed a 60W incandescent light bulb in a paint can. It’s been working great for years. Still on original bulb (knock on wood).
Infrared reptile bulb.
I use a ferm wrap for 1 individual batch out of the chest freezer but also have a reptiles pad raped inside chest freezer if I have 2 batches going at once or need both heat and cold regulated
Small space heater with onboard thermostat that fits inside my fermentation chamber. Probably not the safest…
Honestly, I don’t think most of the options are truly safe. I settled on a reptile heater having known countless reptile owners that still have roofs over their heads, but I am still wary of it. What if it freaks out, melts my better bottle, wort goes into the electronics of the freezer, freezer shorts, house burns down. Maybe I’m just overly paranoid.
Reptile heater (fermwrap) for me. Cheap (<$20), effective, direct, no moving parts, and low enough heat that it never really gets hot. I can also use it for hot ferments like 80-90F saisons, or even lacto ferments 105F. I appreciate that it actually heats the fermenter directly, as opposed to the air around the fermenter, and cools down within a few seconds.
Same here…safe and effective.
I have a small 25 watt silicon stick on heater heater mounted on the underside of an aluminum heat sink as I was concerned about mounting it directly to the plastic wall. I have a small computer fan blowing on it when it when the heater is on to distribute the heat. this system works quite nicely and the temperature is very stable.
Colder is almost always better IMO. When I received a fermenter heater as a gift a few years ago, I re-gifted it the next year to someone else. ;D
I also use the Fermwrap with good results on my 14 G. conical. The conical also gets to wear Grandpa’s old down vest when I’m not using it.
I bought a “desktop” 200 W ceramic space heater at Wal-Mart. It has its own thermal cutout at ~40°C for added safety, and is plenty powerful enough to keep a 100 cu ft fermentation chamber warm.
It’s all relative. My “room temperature” is fine for fermenting lagers, but ales don’t do so well. 
Oh, I don’t know… you might be very surprised to see how low many ale yeasts can go and still perform quite well. Higher pitch rates would help though.
Well, sure, if I had to ferment ales in the 50s (and I have) I could get it done with strain selection - Chico is basically a lager yeast - but what’s the point in brewing ales that taste like lagers? Might as well just ditch the ale strain.
Okay, I’ll go way out on a limb here now…
For most yeast strains, either lager or ale or in between, I theorize that there’s way less flavor impacts due to temperature than most brewers would love to believe. Temperature stability within a reasonable temperature range, perhaps, is more important than exact absolute temperature.
Maybe. I might be wrong. And, like anything, there are exceptions to any rule. A hefeweizen or Belgian strain at 60 F is going to perform a whole lot differently than at 70 F. But a lot of other strains? English? German ale? American ale? California lager? WHO REALLY KNOWS!?!? Answer: Not many. I don’t know. More experiments are needed.
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