Cedar Rapids Brewing Society

I have a small beverage cooler I use for my fermentation chamber. The thermostat is WAY off. The coldest I can get it to go is around 55F even when set to 42F! I've been using a home-made temp controller to override it which works fine for ales. I'd like to also use it for fermenting lagers, so I need to be able to get it down to 50F or so.

I did a search on the internet to see if there was a way to adjust the thermostat with not real luck. It's a Danby DWC3509EBLS if any is curious.

I'm wondering if locating the temperature probe and cutting it off would work? My thinking was that this would make it run all the time, which would be fine with the temp controller. But if it caused to no not run at all I'd be pretty much screwed. Does anyone here know how these typically work?

When you turn it down all the way does it run constant or does it seem to turn on and off like normal? If it runs constant it's most likely low on freon. If it shuts off I look at the thermostat.

I'm not a HVAV tech, but I did stay at a Holiday Inn a couple years ago.

Tom,
I shuts off like normal, so I agree that it's a thermostat problem. The lowest the control goes down to is 42, but it never gets even close to that actual temp.

Since you're using an external controller anyway, you can just remove the thermostat, and splice the wires together.  That's effectively how I run my fridge.  (In my case, the thermostat decided to weld itself permanently-on one day.)

-Jim

On Sun, Dec 19, 2010 at 7:55 PM, carrisr <brew-tech@crbeernuts.org (brew-tech@crbeernuts.org)> wrote:

Tom,
I shuts off like normal, so I agree that it's a thermostat problem. The lowest the control goes down to is 42, but it never gets even close to that actual temp.

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