TC10 with fridge and Lightbulb heater.

[kevinjersey]

This is my first homebrew kit and I managed to get all the bits together to utilise a fridge for the secondary ferment at 18 degrees celcius.
I found an old fridge from a local forsale site for £12.

It looks like it came from a pub and its over 20 years old.
Next I found an old box of screws in the garage to hold the TC10.

Here is the wires inside the box. If you can wire a plug you can install one of these.

There are several ways to wire the heater and cooler. I put a female plug for the fridge and wired the table lamp directly.

You can just make out the table lamp behind the barrel.

And finally my question is this..... Is there any benefit to wiring directly into the fridge to replace the fridge's thermostat, as the TC10 comes with a warning saying compressor equipment has a shortened lifetime due to swiching the fridge on and off. How does a fridge prolong its compressor life, does it turn the compressor off? What part of the fridge is still running when a fridge is not cooling?

[Scooby]

What the TC-10 instructions are talking about is the delay that is adjustable on the TC-10, so even if the thermostat is calling for cooling the compressor won't run until the set delay has been reached.

Constant switching of a compressor shortens it's life, if you set a very fine tolerance on the TC-10 eg +0.1c you run the risk of constantly switching the compressor whether it's replacing the original thermostat or running the fridge as you have set yours up, the delay prevents this. I guess the built in thermostat has a wider tolerance to avoid this in normal use or has it's own built in delay.

Personally I think the way you have it is better, ( I would have had a socket for heating as well as cooling) the TC-10 can be used anywhere you want simply by unplugging, and the fridge can be used as intended if you no longer want to ferment in it.

[Aleman]

I've wired my TC-10 straight into the freezer compressor . . . its easier that way. The TC-10 has a parameter that you can set to control the minimum time delay between the compressor turning off and on again . . . I set mine to 3 minutes. . . . This helps prevent frequent switching of the compressor which can shorten its life considerably. . . . While you might get an over swing in temperature because of this . . . the bulk of the liquid in the Barrel/FV will not experience it.