I'm a cheapskate and an experimentalist so I'm always thinking of ways to cut corners. I wondered how well I could control temperature using a crockpot and a cheap controller.
So, I got the Inkbird C206T controller and used a rubber band to strap its sensor to a quart jar with 500g of water and my floating bluetooth thermometer inside. I filled the crockpot with enough water to match the water level in the jar, covered the whole thing with a "shower cap" and a small blanket. I set the controller for 43.5C.
My reasoning is that the thermal transfer between the water outside and inside should be very efficient and the large mass of water should make the average temperature very stable.
My thermometer records the temperature every minute and compares very well with my ThermaPen's readings. Below I include a graph of the temperature readings over night while the room temperature varied from 20C/69F to 17C/63F. The X axis is minutes and the Y axis is degrees C.
As you can see the temperature inside the jar is very stable around the 43.5C set point, varying only 0.6 degrees C. The default "swing" on the Inkbird is 0.3C which perfectly matches this result.
I'm confident I can get very accurate and repeatable temperature control with this approach.
When I get some time I want to evaluate the variation in the period of the cycles to see if the room temperature variations are detectable.
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Gary, can you take a photo of your crockpot, please?
Looks extremely accurate, Gary!
Do you anticipate using this ti BF your dough?
That looks really great Gary, great idea.
Benny
This is really cool. I'm a tinkerer / experimentalist myself and enjoy seeing these kinds of results. I'm glad to have a basement that has a relatively stable temperature year round for fermenting. If I am ever in need of a way to regulate temps without a basement I will want to try this.
Do you have any pictures of the setup or a drawing? Is the idea to have a dry space surrounded by water that would be temp regulated or would you put something directly into the temp regulated bath? Or is the jar the dry space? Can see that working really well for controlling sourdough ferment temperature.
Here is my "proofer". It is just a cheap cooler with an even cheaper low-power plant mat and a controller. The white lid in the lower right is a quart jar that I normally keep in there for thermal mass; I fill it with hot tap water when firing it up in the morning. You can see the probe for the controller on the pad I have on the bottom for insulation. The plant mat is wrapped around three sides and just fit by a lucky fluke. I normally proof at 30C and this works great.
To proof at 15C I'm using one of those cheap "blue ice" blocks that you keep in the freezer and then put in your cooler. The plant mat can keep up with one of the blocks and maintain 15C in the chamber for 12 hours. The blue ice block replaces the quart jar. When the block runs out of cool I replace it with another.
I didn't realize we were in this thread when I responded. Here is the answer in this context, where I was using a crockpot. I put water in the crockpot and place the temperature probe in the water. My starter or FLAS or whatever is in a jar floating in the water. The heat transfer from the water to the jar is great so everything stays about the same temperature.
I'm wary of placing the unknown metal probe into my food so I always isolate it with air, water or plastic wrap.