Can I Use My FTSs Kit & Cooling Coils To Warm My Beer When It's Super Cold In My Fermenting Area?

Short answer: Yes!

Our FTSs Kits are designed around the concept of using a digital temp controller to control a coolant pump and heater pad to help maintain fermentation temps. Normally, this exceptionally well for homebrewing but for particularly long periods of cold ambient temps (think below 48F) the FTSs Heating Pad may struggle to maintain higher fermentation temps. In this case, you may want to consider adjusting your setup to pump warm water through the cooling coils in your fermenter to help keep your fermentation warm.

There are a couple of cheap/easy ways one could do this - including just sticking a sous vide heater or aquarium heater inside a basin of water like an extra beverage cooler, bucket, sous vide basin, etc. There are more details below on what temp to set your warm water to but we recommend a maximum hot water temp of 110F for this use case as any higher will risk uneven heating and potentially warming the beer too much during use. (Just to note, the FTSs Pump has a max temp rating of 150F)

With an FTss Touch or legacy FTSs2 Controller, you can simply swap the pump to the heater port on the Nub or Controller and you will be ready to roll!

With our legacy FTSs (Cooling Only) Controller you will just need to make a quick adjustment to the Controller's settings so it will be in heating mode and activate the pump when the temperature needs to be raised. Press the “Set” key and hold more than 3 seconds to enter the menu display, the screen appears “HC” code, press the “Set” key to display the working mode, press the “^” or “v” to adjust the display. “C” means cooling mode; “H” means heating mode. Factory Default = “C”.

With that, you will be set up to warm your fermentation using the cooling coils. Just remember that the actual temperature of the warm water source needs to be warmer than the temp you want your fermentation to be. It just has to have enough of a temp differential to work so between 10F-20F should be a good starting point.

For example, if you have 60F beer and a 45F ambient, and you want to warm it to maintain 65F, then set your warm water basin (heated with a sous vide or aquarium heater) to about 85F. This will take some experimentation to find the best settings for your scenario but with a little bit of tinkering, it should help maintain temps right where you need them.