I recently switched to the garage for fermenting and now I’m having issues keeping my temp up in my chest freezer. I have a ranco, which I don’t know if it’s dual stage or just cooling only. I also have a heating pad. If my ranco is cooling only, is there anyway to heat and cool where I don’t have to keep switching stuff off and on? Or should I just purchase a dual temp controller? There’s a C1 and an H1 setting in the ranco, Nt sure what that means. Any advice would be welcome, thanks.
You could put the heater on the fermentor and then something insulating around it (but not too much, maybe a sweater or a couple layers of towel) and then just leaving the heater on a little and make the fridge fight it cooling. Alternatively, go the other way around and set the fridge below the setpoint you want and then just control the heater. Again, have some insulation on the fermentor so it doesn’t have to click on and off too much.
You could put your fermenter on a thick piece of wood on the garage floor then (if it is cold enough in your garage as it is mine) simply put your heating pad on your fermenter and now it will only have to fight the cool of your garage which will be better than it also fighting your chest freezer temps. I would wrap your fermenter in a big old towel to so it can help maintain the heat better.
I would figure out if your unit can also control heating- set a temp higher than ambient on the unit, switch it to what might be heating mode. If it supplies power when it senses a temp lower than the set point, then connecting a heat source would work. If it shuts power when it senses a temp lower than the set point, then it can only cool.
For my garage in winter, I run a reptile heat cable off of a STC-1000 inside my kegerator. So far so good without over taxing the STC-1000 amperage limit.
Your Ranco will either heat (H1) or cool (C1).
I set the ranco to H1 and unplugged the freezer from the power strip. Temp was set at 67f and I placed my starsan bucket inside to test this out(ferm is inside house). The heat up with the pad takes a considerable amount of time longer to heat than for freezer to cool. But it finely made it up to 67 from 50. Thx guys.