if you can do it, woody, I highly recommend it - I love my conical!
Do you have it in a fridge? I’m worried about keeping it warm enough in the garage during the Maine winter
do you secondary in there or rack to cornies?
yes, I have it in a stand up chest freezer. I don’t have a problem with it being warm enough 
I don’t really secondary anything anymore - I do a 2-3 week primary for ales, 3-4 for lagers and then crash and rack to cornies. with the racking arm is really easy to rack without getting a lot of sediment - I’ve been amazed how little is left in the kegs vs. when I used to rack from carboys.
whats the ambient temp where you have it located during the winter?
this is no such thing as ‘winter’ here.
I live in Jupiter, Florida - in January, its usually between 65-75df, occasionally, we’ll have a drop into the 40s or 50s, but it usually doesn’t last long enough to drop the temperature inside my garage.
Ha I can see why you don’t have that problem then
Crispy, I gotta ask… how the hell do you store 24 carboys in any reasonable space and keep them relatively protected?
I have:
Two 6-gallon glass carboys
One 5-gallon glass carboy
Two 7.9-gallon buckets
One converted Sanke keg fermenter
Eight corny kegs
I seldom use the carboys anymore. I’ve started skipping the secondary for most ales, and just cold crash, and keg after a longer primary. For lagers, I rack to a corny for secondary and lagering.
I have only one MiniBrew Plastic Conical fermenter.
I brew every other week and fermenter is ALWAYS in use.
Two 6-7 gallon glass
Two 6.5 gallon better bottles
Four 5 gallons glass
One 3 gallon glass
Two 2.5 gallon glass
(1) 15gal Minibrew Conical
(4) 6gal Better Bottles
(3) 6.5gal Glass Carboys
(2) 5gal Glass Carboys
(10) Corny Kegs
…and a partridge in a pear tree…
I have no carboys whatsoever. I got rid of them all after a pretty bad cut (3 years and the index finger still doesn’t work quite right. I currently use a used 15 gallon HDPE barrel that my old lhbs received bulk extract in, a sabco yeast brink, and the occasional 6 or 7 gallon fermentation bucket. Most batches are 12 gallon in the hdpe barrel.
4- 6.5 gal
6- 5 gal
1-12.5 B3 temp controlled conical
24- cornies
2 - 6.5 gal
3 - 6 gal
2 - 5 gal (that I never use)
And all of them are empty as of tonight, when I kegged an alt. Time to brew!
That would be the downside of the 27 gal. It’s a bit hard to move around when full.
yeah, I have mine attached to a cart w/ casters that I built cause I wasn’t gonna pay $100+ for the Blichmann ones. Just fill at the kettle, roll to the chest freezer, bend at the knees and drive the legs!
my buddy has a few of the 27s and he just has the conical inside the fridge (old soda vending fridge) and pumps the beer about 15ft across his shed from the kettle - seems to work well enough too.
10 6.5 GAL glass
1 6 GAL Better Bottle
1 5 GAL glass
1 3 GAL glass
1 2.5 GAL glass
I was also thinking about transfer tubing from my BK (in the kitchen) to the fermentation fridge in the basement.
I would not have to have pump to do this.
After a series of infections in my glass carboy (yeah, I cleaned and sanitized…over an over), I switched to some buckets because they were so cheap. I prefer them now because they are cheaper, safer, and easier to carry. I do miss watching fermentation and I really liked the idea that all my beer was in contact was glass with carboys, but I’m doing buckets for now. I got 3 of em.
Let see, going off memory I can think of:
3x 6.5-gallon
1x 6 gallon
5-6x 5-gallon (I think most of you can guess what these are filled with)
And a handful of buckets and lots of kegs.