The plan is to use this ancient temperature controller and a lightbulb to keep inside of an insulated box at the right warm temperature (40C) for the 24 hours this requires
I might have a little bit of a problem here. The thermocouple I have is not of the correct type for this controller, so the temperature it reads is wrong, which would be fine because I can see what the actual temperature is, but it looks like I cannot adjust the internal temperature of the box to be much lower than about 50C, which is 10 degrees too warm for making natto
I added a small bowl of water as a thermal mass to simulate having soybeans in the chamber. It's kind of wild how much of a difference that makes. The temperature in the chamber would climb to 120F in maybe 30-40 seconds when it was empty. With the bowl of water in there, it's barely at 93F after 20 minutes.
Yeah, water has a high specific heat, but I didn't expect it to absorb heat from the air that fast
Checking things out with the thermal cam. As expected, there's heat leakage where wires and cords go into the chamber and at the joint between the top and bottom. I did not expect the controller itself to be so warm though
The incubation chamber has decided that it should instead hold steady at 45C. Look how much bacterial growth I'm leaving on the table at that temperature! Ugh.
The instructions say that after the warm fermentation, the beans go into the fridge for a cold fermentation that makes them even slimier and flavorful. So, we'll see tomorrow!
@RueNahcMohr it needs a j type and I have a k-type. And even though I have both iron wire and Constantan wire, my attempts to make my own j type thermocouple did not succeed
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