thermostat
Fridge thermostat
Sitting around one warm summer's night drinking some excellent homebrew beer with some mates, we had been playing around with the idea of building a kegerator-type thing to serve ice cold beer on demand.
We thought that an Esky, some copper piping and valve attachments along with some ice would probably be all it'd take, however after looking online at reasonably sized cooler boxes we noticed the cost was prohibitive (at least, when you're on a student's budget).
So the project took a back seat, until a few weeks later driving home from a party late one Saturday night we saw a bar fridge on the side of the road. I immediately thought that it'd be a perfect substitute for the cooler box in our project, and with a bit of shuffling, the solution to our problem was in the car!
However, it was the next morning that we discovered that unfortunately, the fridge actually worked... Unwilling to dismantle a perfectly working bar fridge, we re-targeted our project. Not too long ago we'd brewed a James Squire Golden Ale imitation, which had been exposed to some unsavoury weather conditions (read: Australian summer) and could have probably been better if it hadn't spent time at 45-50 degrees Celcius. A fridge would have been a good solution to this problem!
However, the built-in thermostat would only allow the fridge to go up to a maximum of 5 degrees... hardly an ideal beer brewing temperature. After looking online for replacement thermostats and finding them both hard to come by, and quite expensive, I decided to design my own.