Hi I am brewing the Hefeweizen by the temperature should be 18 and is just 15 c.m, hence too low. So it seems like the iGulu f1 is not heating enough. Any work around. 3C during fermentation is quite a lot.
The iGulu does not heat, it only cools. So maybe you the machine in a warmer room?
@Nova It actually does include a heater. If you go from chilling mode to fermenting or a custom mode you can actually hear the unit start making sound. It is also documented in the Help Center on their official page in two different locaitons, one of which directly asks is there a heater.
When you create custom recipies as well it allows you to set the fermentation temperature up to 104F/40C. So it can still heat, it just can't go hot enough to boil or sterilize or anything like that. I honestly wish it could go up to 60C, as the triton plastic of the keg can handle up to 100C. If the unit could heat up to 60C, then that would allow a TON more flexibility in brewing, as we could include a pasturization step in recipies allowing us to decide the exact amount of risidual sugar level we want by stopping the yeast when we choose.
More information:
Above action are greatly affected by the room/outside temperture. For example, the heater is more actived in cold brewing enviroment vs. warm, thats why lots of indoor brewers say they didnt detect any heater movement. They may brew under room temperture and the temperture is just what it requires for fermentation.
So their description seems to indicate the heater will only turn on if the ambient temperature outside the iGulu is colder than the set brewing temperature. If I am reading it right that means if for example you have a brew that is SET to run at 78 degrees, and your room is 80 degrees, but for some reason the brews current temperature is 76, the heater wont actually activate since the ambient temperature is currently above the set fermenting temperature, but if the room drops to 75 degress, then the heater will turn on to get it up to the expected fermentation temperature.
I stand corrected. I guess you shall not belive everything on the internet then :)
Honestly, I will be interested in if the unit can actually heat hotter than 40, and they just set that temperature as a practical limit for fermentation and not based on what the machine can actually handle.
If it ends up that we can intercept the data sent to the unit and change the values, I wonder if it will be possible to send 60C instead of 40C. Make the unit run at 60C for 15 minutes to pasturize the keg, and then drop down to chilling temperatures.
@Admin
Wonder if anyone from iGulu can comment on this. Is the heater capable of going hotter and would it be possible to get up to 60C/140F to keg pasturize yeast? Would that temperature level have any effect on the equipment in the machine as it is far below boiling?
Or is the operating temperature of the heater maxed out at 40C?
solved. Okay an upgrade to firmware 2.5 fixed the problem, it does hold the temperature now.
as I did the upgrade I had to program the f1 iGulu manually for the rest of the brew. 18 degrees for 4 days and the cool to 2 degrees for two days to carbonate it.
iGulu support did help nicely and suggested the upgrade. The catch was that I tried to upgrade before and it always failed. See my other post. The reason was that the wifi connection to as unstable (no idea why I have a raspberry pi much further away from my router). So the trick was to use my phone as a hotspot for the iGulu during the upgrade.
it now holds the temperature though a bit towards the lower end quite often drops to 17 for a while and then returns to 18.
I had to change to a second wifi router which seems to be stable now. Do hopefully the fermentation at 15 degrees did not matter too much.
@Bernd It should not have effected it much. The two degree difference at worst would have just slowed it a down a tiny bit, so in a worst case scenario it would be a tiny bit sweeter with a tiny bit less ABV.
I imagine most folks who have update or wifi issues, are also just having connection problems.
