My father in law just purchased me a glass carboy wrap around heat pad. Has anyone had any experience using this? My condo doesn't get higher than 70* and I have a saison that needs to get up to 80* will this work?
It'll probably work. Test it with 5 gal of water and check the temp every 8-12 hours to see if it ramps up. I'd think a towel around the outside of the whole thing would get you a little higher, if you trust it not to burn your condo down. I don't have any first-hand experience with brew belts.
Is it the heat tape kind? i.e. a clear pastic sheet with flat metal wires encased within? (aka a fermwrap) If so, it will do 10 degrees easy. The question though, is do you have a thermostatic controller for it?
Is this the type of heat pad you have: http://www.midwestsupplies.com/fermenting-heater.html ? If so, it states: “raising the temperature of your fermenter by 5-20 degrees.” That is a pretty wide range. I would recommend that you conduct the experiment that @inchrisin mentioned in his post. Cheers!
I have one of these units and can confirm I can easily add 20 degrees F to ambient temps. My basement hovers around 62 deg currently. With just the fermwrap unit, it topped out at 68 when sitting on the concrete floor. However once I put some cardboard under the fermentor and put a sweatshirt over the top, it's now hovering at 88 deg. This is all using a temperature controller. I'd recommend the same. I do not know how warm this would get if I left it plugged in with no controller.
How do you accurately measure the ambient temp in the carboy? The ferm temp strip I have on the carboy only goes up to 78 I believe.
Thermowell. It holds the temperature probe of your controller down in the middle of the wort. I use Johnson A419 controllers.
